[infinispan-dev] First (rough) draft of Getting Started Guide

[Pete Muir]

I have drafted this out at https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/ISPN/Getting+Started+Guide.

We start with a couple of introductory chapters - a brief overview of what Infinispan offers, instructions for how to download and install infinispan, and instructions on the GUIDemo (as it helps people visualise whats going on). We then move on to the bulk of the guide, in which I want to address the most common reasons people want to try out Infinispan:

* Infinispan as a standalone (local) cache. This also serves as the simplest way to get started with Infinispan, hence it's position at the top of the list!
* Infinispan as a data-grid, running from plain Java SE, in either replicated or distributed mode
* Infinispan as the 2nd level cache for Hibernate
* Accessing Infinispan remotely
   * Using Hot Rod
   * Using REST
   * Using memcached
* Using Infinispan inside a JBoss AS 7 cluster
* Using Infinispan inside another server (e.g. Tomcat, GlassFish)

and finally a common topic

* Monitoring Infinispan

In my experience this represents 95% of the reasons people want to look at Infinispan, so we should hopefully get most people up and running with their use case quickly with these tutorials.

I've built up the tutorials for the first two cases (distributed mode is missing) from the old tutorials to give you an idea of the style, level and content that the other tutorials would contain. Each tutorial would be acompanied by a quickstart (example, sample) that contains the code discussed in the tutorial and is runnable. You can find snapshots of the quickstarts zip at https://hudson.qa.jboss.com/hudson/view/Infinispan/job/Infinispan-Quickstart/ - this will appear on ci.jboss.org at some point under the job name "Infinispan-Quickstart" but the publishing queue appears to be temporarily broken ;-)

Any comments, thoughts etc.? Are we missing a common use case? Is the explanation too practical and doesn't explain concepts properly?

Once we get this contents flushed out, I would like to get a few volunteers to help with writing up the guides and quickstarts - someone for each topic. I'll help out with editing etc. of course :-)

A few notes:

* I've moved the Scala and Groovy stuff out (to the user guide) as I just don't believe this is really of great interest to the majority of people thinking of using Infinispan
* I haven't migrated the monitoring Infinispan content from SBS, as I think Galder was working on this?
* I haven't linked in the GUIDemo stuff as I want to discuss where this should live with everyone