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frustrated [message #82777]

Tue, 08 March 2005 17:33

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: roniko.amdocsREMOVE_THIS.com

it's amazing to me how many hours are wasted by me and i am sure many others
trying to hack/guess how to extend VE.
i've read all the documents and looked at all the examples - always ending
up hitting some wall.
perhaps a 1000 monkeys hitting 1000 keyboard randomly could extend VE
successfully after a 1000 years...
but what chance does a single monkey (e.g. me) have in modifying randomly
bits and pieces of xml/xmi/java/properties/god knows what else?

it's amazing that i cannot find a single example of extending VE that has a
minimum documentation that tells you
how to install and deploy it. VE has no documentation. i can't tell how to
use the examples... others documents are either outdated or apply to some
ibm eclipse-like environment which may have most of the information workable
in eclipse, but enough is not that you'll never get it going (e.g. the wizzo
gadgets example)

it's amazing that VE is a tool that should help you get the job done quickly
but you spend most of your time trying
to look at code and bits of distributed properties and guess what to do, and
eventually find out that all the time you investigated
in it was just a waste of time.

my guess is that the reason i can't find any documented example on the web
is because no one has been able to produce one!
it's a puzzle that only a small group at ibm understands... the rest of us
just ask questions and eventually give up.
i see lots of questions but the answers are basically "there is a clue
there... and another clue there... the rest... well, try to figure out
by trying".

this is very frustrating. are we dealing with computer science here? seems
almost like alchemy...

perhaps someone at ibm could take the time and write a tiny documented
example on how to extend VE.
just one complete and documented example, the way only ibm can do so well,
could replace most of this newsgroup.

thanks
rk

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Re: frustrated [message #83024 is a reply to message #82777]

Wed, 09 March 2005 19:01

Dave Orme

Messages: 424
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi Roni,

I want to assure you that your concerns are heard. Documentation is on
our VE 1.1 plan and I began working on some starting last week.

We're sorry this has taken so long, but when we started the 1.1 cycle,
we had to decide between doing documentation and performance first. We
chose performance because we were concerned that the performance work
would break APIs.

The first iteration performance work is nearly complete and like I said
I have started work on some beginning documentation.

Thank you for your patience.

Best regards,

Dave Orme
VE Team Lead

roni wrote:
> it's amazing to me how many hours are wasted by me and i am sure many others
> trying to hack/guess how to extend VE.
> i've read all the documents and looked at all the examples - always ending
> up hitting some wall.
> perhaps a 1000 monkeys hitting 1000 keyboard randomly could extend VE
> successfully after a 1000 years...
> but what chance does a single monkey (e.g. me) have in modifying randomly
> bits and pieces of xml/xmi/java/properties/god knows what else?
>
> it's amazing that i cannot find a single example of extending VE that has a
> minimum documentation that tells you
> how to install and deploy it. VE has no documentation. i can't tell how to
> use the examples... others documents are either outdated or apply to some
> ibm eclipse-like environment which may have most of the information workable
> in eclipse, but enough is not that you'll never get it going (e.g. the wizzo
> gadgets example)
>
> it's amazing that VE is a tool that should help you get the job done quickly
> but you spend most of your time trying
> to look at code and bits of distributed properties and guess what to do, and
> eventually find out that all the time you investigated
> in it was just a waste of time.
>
> my guess is that the reason i can't find any documented example on the web
> is because no one has been able to produce one!
> it's a puzzle that only a small group at ibm understands... the rest of us
> just ask questions and eventually give up.
> i see lots of questions but the answers are basically "there is a clue
> there... and another clue there... the rest... well, try to figure out
> by trying".
>
> this is very frustrating. are we dealing with computer science here? seems
> almost like alchemy...
>
> perhaps someone at ibm could take the time and write a tiny documented
> example on how to extend VE.
> just one complete and documented example, the way only ibm can do so well,
> could replace most of this newsgroup.
>
> thanks
> rk
>
>

--
Visual Editor Project lead
http://www.db4o.com -- The Open-source Java Object Database

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Re: frustrated [message #83521 is a reply to message #83024]

Mon, 14 March 2005 21:05

Gili Mendel

Messages: 338
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

.... as Dave noted, we are going to start releasing a set of tutorials,
(the firs one hopefully this week) to provide a set of typical extension
use cases. The VE builder is a layer above Eclipse, EMF and GEF.... many
technologies to master which makes it quite steep to tackle up front....
but once mastered, VE is quite flexible and powerful. ... With a small
group of developer it is hard to satisfy in a short time badly needed
feature required by the tool users (like support for RCP) and
documentation and supported APIs the is required by VE extandors;-( We
are trying our best to satisfy all as soon as we can.

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