For some reason which is completely beyond me, Apache java projects – at least the ones I encounter lately and that are a less known outside the Java community – tend to be huge, complicated, and require lots of dependancies (some even circular inter-dependancies).
All this makes using them out-of-the-box as I expect any development library to work, almost impossible. In order to use something simple such as a templating system you need to have a full set of Apache java projects installed, including a project management suite, an HTTP client, a WebDAV client (which for some wierd reason is not the same thing), database persistancy layer, and more and more.
At this point I’m trying to use the Apache Torque (db-torque in jpackage lingo) which is a Java database abstraction layer, as insalled from JPackage 1.6. Apparently, using it is so “simple” – you just need to edit 3 (!!) files :-/.. and then do this and this and this and this.. and none of it is properly documented where you would expect to find such documentation – in the jpackage ..-manual package or the web site for the project. The manual package at least comes with a basic tutorial but its (a) extremly skimpy on actual details, (b) refers to files that cannot be found on the jpackage archive, and (c) apparently was removed from the actual web site for some reason.
(more…)
