[GNUe] GNUe and beginners

[Adrian Maier]

Hello,

I currently have some spare time and I plan to spend it on learning to
develop applications
with gnue. Maybe this time i'll be able to "take off" and become able
to use it for real
applications   (this is not my first attempt to learn gnue)  .

I have seen in the list archives a recent and interesting thread "GNUe
in actual production use" . I'm starting this new thread because i've
joined the list very recently , therefore I
can't reply directly .

I've known about gnue for almost two years i think. Right from the beginning it
seemed to be a very interesting approach. However,  each time when
I've tried to
use it i've stumbled.   At first I thought that i wasn't stable enough. Now my
perception is different : it is stable, but you need to discover by
yourself how to
use it.

Mark pinpointed some issues. Those are true and i'd like to add my comments. My
purpose is to give some (hopefully constructive) feedback. So, please accept my
appologises in case you find that i'm too critical  .

- Documentation not suffisament supplements and synthetic
- Lack of examples concrete and complex

As Reinhard wrote : "This is the *big* problem I currently see in GNUe" . I am
very-very-very happy to see that the people are planning some work in
this direction.

The lack of complete docs and examples is quite painful for the beginner. I
think that's why Mark said "closed community" :  because it's hard to
start using
gnue. It's clear that people have improved gnue constantly over the
years,  but from
a beginner's point of view it is equally hard to start now as it was
one or two years
ago .

Let's look at the gnue-forms docs.  We have:  Developers Guide, Tech Reference,
Concepts Guide, Users Guide.  The Tech Reference and the Developers Guide
both contain information about the gfd elements and attributes ... redundancy.
Also the Develpers' Guide is full of "TODO" and the version is  0.5.4 ...

These 4 documents should be merged and converted to a format that would allow
generation of html and ps/pdf  from the same source: like docbook or something
similar.

The chosen format should be text-based (sgml/xml)  so that it will be possible
to get patches for the documentation ....

I can't imagine how the users could *ever* help with improving those documents
if we keep them as openoffice documents .

Another issue about the docs:  there is no place where all the valid
elements and
attributes for the gfd files are described. The gnue-forms.dtd  and also
GFParser.py  are almost complete. But some things are missing :  the "Char:X",
"Char:Y"  attributes of the <label> .   Also,  the <trigger>  element
does not appear
in that dtd.


- Web site not suffisament effective
My impression is that the documentation is scattered all over the
place. We have :
a)  "Documentation"  , containing Project/Tool/Package/Community/FAQ
  (The Tool Documentation link is currently broken ,   btw ) .
b)  "Core Documenatation" , containing the api (generated from the
classes ?) and some
    tech docs.
c)  "Wiki"
d)  Some swx documents contained within gnue-forms.tar,gz,  etc. I'm
not sure whether
   these exist on the website as well  (?)   If not,  they should be
put on the site as well.

Probably the idea is to separate the gnue (the erp) docs from the
gnue-tools docs .
However the impression is that even the docs dedicated to the
programmers are not
in only one place .


I hope that some of these points are at least a little useful.

Cheers,
Adrian Maier