[forge-dev] Forge 2 - Starting troubles

[Vineet Reynolds Pereira]

Hey all,

    I managed to get a beginner (who shall be anonymous for now), to try out Forge 2. It turned out to be rather interesting, since he managed to build it from source, install JBossTools-Forge into Eclipse, before running into some issues. I think some of these would affect how we look at usability of Forge in several areas - the tooling in Eclipse, the web site etc.

    Some of the questions that were asked were:

    1. "Is there an overview or something of forge 1/2 ?"

    and later (in response to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpou-FWWatI):

    "not really, it tells me more about how powerful it is - but no overview, why I should do what, says I can use it from the command line but I did not spot how, ..."

    I think a beginner guide would help here, that would help users who're new to even Java EE.

    2. Later on, when using Forge in Eclipse, this feedback was offered:
    "I noticed on the 'Forge Run Command' dialog, the Tooltip did not really add much to what could be gained from the command name!
     ...
     possible it might be a good idea to have a variable sized text panel in the bottom half to give a more detailed explanation"
    
    I'm not sure if the Eclipse UI guidelines allow for that, but it's something to consider.

    3. Another interesting issue is that of the EE 6/7 POMs being installed into the project:

      * Selected 'JPA setup' version 2.1
      * Selected Wildfly Aplication Server
      * Specified: Java EE, forge-default
      * Modified HSQLDB to POSTGRES using java:jboss/datasource/ExamplDS as datasource, 
      * and now pom.xml has <artifactId>jboss-javaee-6.0</artifactId> and other changes

     The EE 7 APIs were expected to added here.

    I've also raised FORGE-1385 for Java 1.7 support, but that's fixed and should be out in the next release, so it is moot.

    Discuss!

Vineet