Comments on: Technology Foothold 101

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:38:34 +0000

Very piece advices. I very like the parctical point of view: the zip must be contained in a directory. Thinking about Tapestry? This little thing is very annoying thing.
And many more.
I a prefer 10 minuts example.
I very like the “step by step” tutorials. Such as in Spring. very usefull, and helps to really understand how thing get together.

Successfull projects have great doc. Punto i basta.

By: tra

tra — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:41:08 +0000

Eric,

Thanks for your constructive comments. I will pass them to the community’s
documentation project owners. The intent of the initial chapters is
to explain the core concepts of JXTA before diving into specific code
samples.

Jacques,

If you could not get things done in JXTA after three years, sounds
more like JXTA was not the right technology for you

By: Jacques

Jacques — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:17:34 +0000

Have no clue?

I waste three years dealing with JXTA. Trying to make things work, and it was a quite bad experience. It’s not because there’s a project using it right now that it is a good alternative. I didn’t post any details because this blog is not a forum and JXTA cannot bypass its drawbacks even with heroic efforts. JXTA has been around for at least 5 years (FIVE YEARS!) and how many apps do you really use that JXTA based?

By: Dean

Dean — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:19:56 +0000

I think there should be a BHI (Burke Hostility Index) rating for technology investigation. Then when one is interested in something they can check the BHI to see if it’s within their personal foothold threshold.

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 13:35:23 +0000

@tra that’s the version I used. The programmer guide may be rewritten and even up-to-date, but it is far too verbose and immensely overwhelming for newcomers. It spends way too much time extolling the virtues of JXTA in early chapters without showing concrete examples until Chapter 6: “The Basics”. The first code example, again in Chapter 6, shows three full pages of code to…generate an ID. Huh?

That is followed by a NINE PAGE example called “AdvertisementTutorial”. Talk about complicated! That’s “The Basics”?

Here is my advice. Chapter 1 should show a tiny Hello World program.

Chapter 2 should show a P2P app like a little Chat program.

The next example can show how to add a screen to the Chat program that shows all members of the group.

Then you can show how to handle new members coming and going, i.e. incorporating concepts like advertisements and unique ID generation.

The existing examples seem like random complicated facts and APIs. If I can’t write a small program after an entire day, something is seriously wrong.

By: tra

tra — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 08:32:25 +0000

Too bad you could not spend one more day on JXTA! People are doing pretty neat stuff
with JXTA lately. Check this http://saxta.geog.umd.edu

You may want to check the latest JXTA 2.5 release and new programmer guide which is really making
things much simpler.

Jacques, sorry to hear you have such bad opinion of JXTA, but sounds like you are the
kind of guys that have no clue about what you are talking about. I am using JXTA and
not seeing any of the problem you are mentioning.

By: Dennis S

Dennis S — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:17:07 +0000

@myself
-1 Also, also, also… clicker faster than the proofreader…

By: Dennis S

Dennis S — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:15:48 +0000

Also give me a glossary of terms… it seems every time I begin working with a new application they have another way of naming things. Also, I may be a real newbie to the topic, help me know what I don’t know. Also provide a breakout/breakdown/subdivision, for the beginner, intermediate and nitty gritty. Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong. (sorry Dennis Miller)

By: Jacques

Jacques — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:35:39 +0000

JXTA teaches a lot of ‘not to do things’. Quite awesome. The project aimed too high and fell quite uglily. There are heroes trying to make this big software crap to happen, but it is something not worth the effort.

What is the value of a p2p platform that cannot guarantee that a (little) data stream is sent to a peer even after a connection has been ’sucessfuly’ established? Or something so pretty difficult to configure and run? No, thanks.

By: Chris Winters

Chris Winters — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:50:21 +0000

Nice. This stuff can’t be said enough.