The form would not undeploy, so I ended up re-installing the server, and creating a new pipa-deploy.xml. Now, it works as it is supposed to.

I'm glad to hear it works now. I will file an enhancement request to prevent spaces in the first place. This should help prevent the same thing from happening.

Do you have a suggestion on how we could reword the tutorial to make it clearer for someone starting out?

Thanks,
Pascal.

I don't have a specific suggestion for clarifying that aspect of this tutorial, although I will think about it a bit.

I might suggest, however, that a section "For the Novice" could be added to the samples and tutuorials, to cover some of these basics that are undoubtedly obvious to the techies out there, but which are not necessarily so obvious to the business analysts who may not have as in-depth an understanding of the underlying technologies. By segregating the section, those with experience can easily skip over it, while those of us who are novices can study it to avoid some of these traps.

Further, while I think the tutorials and samples are excellent, I do have difficulty understanding the purpose behind some of the steps described. This makes it hard to extrapolate from the specific to the general, and in those instances where there's a mistake in the write-up, it's difficult to know if the problem is in the execution or in the instructions. While it's probably not reasonable to ask you all to provide that kind of insight, perhaps some links to further info that is already publicly available would be feasible. After all, part of the problem with any learning curve is that novices often don't understand enough to know what questions to ask, and are therefore prone to getting muddled in relatively minor problems (like having spaces in the URIs).

Post edited by: cgk, at: 2006/09/19 12:44

Thank you very much for your insight!

In other words, you'd be interested (and potentially others as well) to understand better not only how to accomplish certain tasks, but also why it is done a certain way, and what it implies on other parts of you process. Is this a good interpretation of what you are saying?

I'm thinking about a short tutorial, but with a lot of details about the concepts, the reasons things are built the way we recommend it and so on. Probably staying shy of the actual generated BPEL.

Would something like that be useful?


Thanks,
Pascal.

This is very good feedback indeed. Maybe we should add something that tells users the level of expertise that is required to understand a given tutorial/example. For the moment, tutorials are more in the spirit of "if you want to do X, here is how to do it step by step".

It is difficult to explain in a tutorial too much about why something is needed or done in a specific way without losing track of what the tutorial is trying to achieve. For some reason, there has not been too many questions about why a tutorial says to do something in a specific way. The forums would be a good place for this and we could link tutorials to such forum discussions. Most questions that relate to tutorials are about difficulties in following them successfully.

Also, the tutorials tend to explain the most complex things that can be done with the products. Implicitely, the idea is that if you can do this, then you should be able to do anything. We should probably add some simpler tutorials for more basic things.

By the way, if anybody is interested in building some simple tutorials and examples, we'd appreciate your help! The best tutorials are those coming from people who faced such issues.

Precisely!

What's the saying -- you give a person a fish, they eat for a day. You teach them how to fish, and they eat for a lifetime?

Tutorials are something like that. With the proper explanations, they can teach how to do the work in general, rather than just how to do that particular problem.

As for the Forums - they do have the potential to handle this, but again, they tend to get caught up in minutae of specific problems related to specific examples. I haven't really seen any part of the Forum that addresses the underlying issues in a methodical or comprehensive way. (Or am I just not looking in the right places?) Right now, it seems to be mostly ad hoc, and is not too easy to access advice for specific types of problems, particularly if you don't even know how to formulate the question.

Some suggested topics might include:

1) An Index that helps access the information already available a little more readily. E.g., I stumbled onto the fact that the "Store" sample was about Chained Processes. (Unfortunately, it's not as comprehensive as I would like. I've had to examine the code at length to try and extrapolate how to apply it to my own processes, and I'm not even sure it's the right process to use. Still, I felt lucky to find it at all. But I digress.) While there is clearly some effort to organize the Forums into logical headings, it's still difficult to find answers, even to questions that have been discussed at length in numerous different threads.

2) Types of processes available (e.g., Chained, Compound Gateways, etc.), when and why to use them (or when not to use them), and what elements need to be included. (Similar to the format followed in "Designing Processes with People Activities", but with a little more explication for non-techies.) A more in-depth prologue in the tutorials, with an index of key words and topics would go a long way to achieving this objective.

In line with this, I sometimes have difficulty translating from the BPMN specification to the BPMS execution. Some of these elements I just described would help make that transition from theory to reality a little easier.

3) Common error messages - what they mean, what causes them, and how to fix them.

It also seems to me that in your reading over of people's geronimo logs, you must be coming across the same problems over and over. Again, in searching through the Forums, I find ad hoc examples of what I'm looking for, but they're not organized in a way that makes it easy to access. I'm thinking of something along the lines of an FAQ, but a little more formal and organized.

Hope these comments help! And if I'm missing work that you guys have already put out there, please let me know. I'm not a big fan of re-inventing the wheel, if I can help it.

Thanks.

cgk