What happen when new users join a team??

As some users are joining XPontus XML Editor project, I have to write quickly a readable and simple documentation.
Who will bother read 500 pages of text before programming? Not me at least!! I have used Hibernate but never read the whole manual. Same goes with other technologies I have used(Apache Cocoon, Wicket, JSF, etc...)

I assumed that most people in the industry use Maven which is not true. I work for a non lucrative company and we use maven a lot. Most people don't use Maven at all, they know about it, they know what some guys have been doing with it, but that's all. Well, I can understand them, why bother with a tool if you feel you don't need it?

I have been using Maven for about 4 years. It has its pros and cons. I think that a simple Java project don't require Maven. It's just overkill.

With XPontus new members, I got to fill the gap between what I know and what others don't:

• The learning curve of newcomers shouldn't be high.
• The unfinished developer guide should be done and should almost make it look easy

Basically, I use Maven at 10% of its capabilities. With Apache Maven I do the following steps :

• Compile and run the program(manage dependencies too)
• Generate the website
• Generate the java web start installer and sign the jar files

I could also commit to subversion, deploy the website using SFTP, all that with maven, but I don't.

I noticed that Eclipse has a poor maven support. I use Eclipe time to time but that's it. I switched to Netbeans 2 years ago. Netbeans has great maven support compared to others IDEs.
So when a guy, is telling me "what do I do in Eclipse to do...", in Netbeans it would be a simple click... I might need to switch to Eclipse to come up with good answers as most people are using Eclipse.


I am very excited that some guys are showing interest in XPontus. So what I though was clear in my mind, I have to explain to others and be patient. They have to be patient with themselves too!

XPontus is not like Eclipse, but I don't think average guys could code it in a week. I made some choices which are sometimes good, but sometimes they have limitations. I will rewrite some parts of XPontus when I'll feel that the team has a good understanding of XPontus architecture.