TeaVM Tutorial Video #1 on YouTube

[ScraM Team]

The ScraM Team has posted our first video on creating web apps with TeaVM:

https://youtu.be/kf-lUoVU-zc

This is the first in a series about creating a personalized newspaper using TeaVM.

Please let us know what areas you'd like to see in future videos.

[vic-cw]

I think this is a great idea.

In my opinion, the bottleneck to TeaVM's growth is not features, but communication and documentation.

[ScraM Team]

Thanks!

What other content would you like to see?

I think the official TeaVM documentation ( http://teavm.org/docs/intro/overview.html ) covers the majority of core features.  Indeed, that is where I gained most of my understanding.

I have always been a fan of the 'Cookbook' style books from O'Reilly, in which a language or toolkit is used to build a variety of interesting, small projects.  I am aiming to produce similar content in articles and videos.  I hope that it will both be interesting reading/viewing, and inspire people to use TeaVM to create their own programs.

[vic-cw]

I am not sure exactly what should be improved about the documentation, but when I started using TeaVM I struggled quite a bit and ended up finding that the best way to know how to do something is to look at Flavour's source code. This hints at a problem with the documentation. It might be a lack of a step by step Getting started guide. I am not even sure that there isn't one, maybe there is. It might be the need for a better navigation inside documentation, with more subcategories, maybe subpages for better referencing on Google.

One thing that is for sure, documentation could be more thorough. Often examples cover only one use case, not all options of a given feature.

Another idea I had, that I think would be great, would be to make a tutorial for people who have never done web development. I think frameworks really catch up when it's the first solution someone learns. As of now, I don't think there is a TeaVM piece of documentation or tutorial that doesn't assume that the reader is familiar with "traditional" JavaScript web development. If there was one tutorial explaining how to build a website, for someone who just knows Java, doesn't know anything about web development, we could point young aspiring programmers to it, and they would learn the web in Java.

[ScraM Team]

All excellent points.  Thanks for providing such detailed info.

I seem to have had somewhat better luck with the documentation (including Flavour), I rarely delve into the sources unless I'm fixing something (like the Unicode PR that got accepted recently, yay!). 

I definitely agree that there are lots of neat things about TeaVM and Flavour that are mentioned quickly in the docs but have lots more to discover.  Modal Dialogs come to mind, they are mentioned briefly ( http://teavm.org/docs/flavour/advanced-ui-components.html ) but they work nicely.

 

As time goes on, I am aiming my content towards newcomers.  The video that started this thread starts with the maven archetype and builds from there.  And I have an article for people coming from Swing that tells them what parts of the web environment correspond to concepts they are used to from Swing: https://frequal.com/TeaVM/migration/MigratingFromSwingToTeaVm.html

I remember years ago being impressed with the Swing documentation.  It included thorough API-level javadocs, tutorials, and lots of sample code.  Building that out will take time.  Sun seemed to have several full-time technical writers on staff documenting the Java APIs.

I like your point about documentation for Java developers who haven't built many web apps.  I will try some articles in that vein and see how it goes.

[vic-cw]

You're very welcome. Thanks a lot to you for doing this work. In my opinion this is what is most needed for TeaVM to take off

[ScraM Team]

Swing had a nifty app called SwingSet which demonstrated numerous features.  It also showed source code so you could see how to use the components in your own app.  I figured this might be a good option, so I've started Tea Sampler, built with TeaVM/Flavour:

https://frequal.com/tea-sampler

[vic-cw]

This is great. This goes totally in the direction I was mentioning, this is definitely very helpful.

Some thoughts on how to make new user experience better with this in mind:

• I was not aware that this existed. Given that I use TeaVM for more than a year, I think this hints to a problem
  • Maybe it would be good to link to it from the TeaVM documentation website
  • Maybe it would be good to improve Google referencing:
    • be more explicit on the landing page on what this website presents
    • do some minimal SEO for each page of this site
    • such an endeavor would probably face one problem with Flavour as it is today: Google doesn't index hash pages. I don't know if Flavour users have found a way around it, but in my opinion it would be crucial that subpages of Tea Sampler be indexed by Google. The goal would be that if someone googles "teavm dialog", the subpage on dialogs shows up first or second
• The examples are really good. Maybe one way to make this total-newbie-friendly would be to provide the whole files and the whole file structure for each example. I don't know if the aim of this website is to be total-newbie-friendly though. Just in case, here is what I mean:
  • current examples don't include the imports for example
  • current examples don't mention where the "HTML" should be etc
  • current examples don't mention what the Maven build file should be, how to run it etc
  • all of these don't seem to me to be very big costs to add, both from a writer perspective and from a reader perspective. I don't think it would clutter pages too much

Again, congratulations on this. I think this is definitely the kind of thing that is crucial to make TeaVM take off. I hope this feedback can be useful to go further.

[ScraM Team]

On Monday, July 27, 2020 at 4:54:03 AM UTC-7, vic-cw wrote:

I was not aware that this existed. Given that I use TeaVM for more than a year, I think this hints to a problem

I just created it in response to this thread.  :-)  I'll make a top-level post here to make it more visible.

On the Google SEO limitations of hash-based SPAs, I'll post separately.  I have some ideas on enhancing Flavour to help in certain cases.

• The examples are really good. Maybe one way to make this total-newbie-friendly would be to provide the whole files and the whole file structure for each example.

I'll make a few quick steps in this direction.  I agree more is needed, I'll have to see what I can do, especially keeping it maintainable (automated).

Again, congratulations on this. I think this is definitely the kind of thing that is crucial to make TeaVM take off. I hope this feedback can be useful to go further.

This feedback is indeed welcome and motivational, thanks.

[vic-cw]

On Tuesday, 28 July 2020 at 03:22:32 UTC+2 ScraM Team wrote:

On Monday, July 27, 2020 at 4:54:03 AM UTC-7, vic-cw wrote:

I was not aware that this existed. Given that I use TeaVM for more than a year, I think this hints to a problem

I just created it in response to this thread.  :-)  I'll make a top-level post here to make it more visible.

Hahaha amazing! 

On the Google SEO limitations of hash-based SPAs, I'll post separately.  I have some ideas on enhancing Flavour to help in certain cases.

• The examples are really good. Maybe one way to make this total-newbie-friendly would be to provide the whole files and the whole file structure for each example.

I'll make a few quick steps in this direction.  I agree more is needed, I'll have to see what I can do, especially keeping it maintainable (automated).

Again, congratulations on this. I think this is definitely the kind of thing that is crucial to make TeaVM take off. I hope this feedback can be useful to go further.

This feedback is indeed welcome and motivational, thanks.

Great!