Documentation Observation

[ylluminate]

Hey folks, just an observation. A fellow with whom I've worked quite
a bit in the past attempted to use Hobo for a project and was met with
some frustration. Initially I just let him go at it as he indicated
that he really didn't need any help as things seemed clear from the
website. I just got an email from him today expressing some concerns
and an absolute desire to avoid using Hobo for a few reasons that *HE*
gleaned from the site:

1) Documentation is mostly for Hobo 1.0 for Rails 2; No docs at all
for a Rails 3 version and I don't even see a release of Hobo for Rails
3.
2) Very small community ; very small faq and recipes list; if you get
stuck you have to write the author or explore sources.
3) Framework does not appear to be actively maintained or supported
(screencast dated 2008; seems that the system is creeping along much
slower than it should be) at least as quickly as something as a Rails
based framework should be.
4) If the Hobo developer leaves the project, the project will die.

Further he noted to me: Hobo is excellent to build prototypes, but
after you want something non-standard, it's easy to fail. For example
I need to provide customers a table with sorting and filtering
options. I tried to use <table-plus> tag, but found some bugs (for
example sorting stops after i've added internationalization),
filtering didn't work at all (i tried <filter-menu>). It's completely
unclear where can i get initial html layout, and the dryml tags logic
is not clear nor very well documented. Further, in real projects I'd
like to add db constraints manually (for example I always add foreign
keys and set key fields to not-null), but Hobo determines this and
always attempts to return it back. Finally, for large projects
application.dryml will became enormous and difficult to support.
--END NOTE--

Now, because I've followed the community for years and asked questions
here off and on, I know where to look and how to answer such questions
more or less, however for someone who just comes across the website,
Hobo very easily can appear to be in a serious state of disrepair.
Obviously I know that it is not, but I thought that I should share
this experience of someone brand new coming to Hobo who simply thought
that they could use the website. I really think that the site does
need to be updated and we need to have a deeper community based effort
to keep it up to date. A new screencast with 1.3 on the front would
also be nice to see just so that people don't have this 2008
impression of stagnation... or do away with the screencast (although I
do agree that it's exciting and powerful for new comers; it does
quickly let one down when they start thinking about it without a
proper foundation).

In my reply I addressed as much as I could and pointed him to Hobo 1.3
to resolve some of his table and filtering issues. I further
suggested the beta version of the book right now. Finally I told him
that he really should get involved in the mailing list here as it is a
great group of folks who normally respond within a few hours when
possible.

Any further suggestions that I can send his way would be appreciated,
however, as I noted, I felt that this is something that we should all
know or be prescient of as I think it's an indication of things to
come or what may already be happening to dissuade many new developers
from jumping on board.

As I've spoken with other much more seasoned Hobo devs on the list
here, there is a steeper learning curve for DRYML, no doubt about it.
Documentation and a plethora of examples in a better formatted system
is probably called for. I think we need to generally revamp the
recipe section and really get more instructional in many practical
examples that build on each other.

Again, it goes back to some discussions we've had before and Ive just
not had time to dedicate a serious amount of time to building out the
cheat sheet and other things that I've discussed with some folks on
the list and off the list. (Please forgive me as my life has not only
been hectic, but a severe electrical storm claimed about 10k worth of
equipment this past week and I'm working on getting back into gear;
passed right into my network cabling through an EMF pulse of all
things!)

At any rate, thought everyone here might appreciate the remarks &
thoughts and have some feelings or thoughts to share.


-George

[Bob Sleys]

I don't know whats holding up 1.3 release at this time other than time on peoples part to get it done.  The cookbook is ready to go, the book is off to print (I think or close to it) and the code looks pretty stable at this point.