Re: [GNUe] GNUe Samples/Baseline Target

[James Thompson]

Sorry for the late replies today.  Real work and all that :)

> Since the "product" is for developers (right now at least), the sales job
> consists of convincing a developer that he can build something useful
> with GNUe.
>
> It does little good to spray a bunch of example files around, with no
> indication of what they do, or how they interoperate.

I was going to ask "So are the Developers guides not going in the right 
direction for people?"  Then I re-read them.  Its obvious they need more work 
than I expected.  So lets start with some basics.  Since the server is down 
I've recreated the pdf files and placed what I think are the 2 more current 
at http://www.math.ksu.edu/~jamest/downloads/docs/

In the gnue-common doc the chapter Hello World was supposed to show how to use 
gnue-common as a base for your own applications.  

In the gnue-forms guide the chapter Creating Your First Form was to do the 
same.  

I'd be curious to know if these chapters are simple enough for people.  Too 
simple?  Or not a realistic enough examples.  I think I'd like to start with 
these guides and expand upon them to meet peoples needs.  But only if they 
seem like they are going to meet peoples needs.

> 1) get GNUe setup, and do something that convinces me I'm done setting it
> up (like a quick validation of the environment).  A canned example does
> fine for this.

OK.  On windows installs we had an intro icon for forms that served that 
purpose.  I don't think we ever did anything like that in non-windows 
environments.  It's not a perfect solution but if you have the gnue-forms 
source there is samples/intro/intro.gfd

if the following works

gnue-forms intro.gfd 

in that intro directory then you have at least a mostly functional install of 
common and forms.  I don't know of a simple test for appserver, mainly 
because I've not been using it.

>
> 2) walk me through construction of some simple classes from scratch.
> Bowling scores or Teachers/Classes/Students type of thing -- nothing too
> complex - the problem domain is not the issue, the software is.  It
> should touch a lot of areas, but not be bulky or complex.

I'm assuming here we're talking about using appserver in a 3 tier environment.  
I don't think documentation for appserver exists at this time because it's 
been in a state of flux.

If you are interested in using gnue-schema to create portable table 
definitions then sadly about all the docs we have to go by are some text file 
examples.  I'm sure we could take the examples and add a tutorial to the 
common docs if people think this is a feature they'd be interested in using.

> 3) let me code some business rules for these objects.

This is appserver related.  Reinhard and co, are we to a point that we could 
start a guide for it?

> 4) walk me through building a form or two
>
> 5) walk me through building a report or two.
>
> 6) let me play with this and see how it looks and works.
>

These are all reasonable requests.  

> would be useful, but IMHO, the software isn't there in its lifecycle yet.

The sad thing is that for 2 tier apps it really is.  We just need to do a 
better job of showing that.

If people are willing to give me feedback and ideas on the documentation I'm 
willing to put some time into getting these docs up to where people can find 
them useful.

Take Care,
James