Documention ????

Hi,

Well, I am quite annoyed with the way, how JetBrains conducts the documentation and tutorial business with the last IntelliJ releases. Currently, I am exploring the new Hibernate, JPA, and Spring features and quite often I am lost. The few pages, which are available in the "help system" look more or less like placeholders and aren't by any means suitable for new users of either Hibernate, Spring etc. or IntelliJ. If I compare this to other products such as MyEclipse (which are even cheaper than IJ), IntelliJ looks like one of these poorly documented open source projects.

We have to train new team members to IntelliJ and try to figure out the new support for the aforementioned frameworks. However, if me, as a long time IJ user, cannot figure many things out by myself, how should the other newbies?

For example: I want to use Hibernate with annotations. Do I have to setup a Hibernate facet, a JPA facet or both?

If a create an entity with JPA annotation, can I generate an appropriate database table - I couldn't figure out. I want to create first my domain model, do the mapping with annotations, and create the DB table form it. Looks like this is not possible. Or is it?

Really, please, provide more and better material to get unexperienced users learn IntelliJ and its new features. If the documentation business keeps in its current stage, I am afraid that the move to MyEclipse in inevitable.

We use IntelliJ since version 2.5 and have made every upgrade step since then. However, I feel that the discrepancy between the IDE's complexity and its documentation was never so big as with IntelliJ 7.0.

It's not the fist time, I complain about JetBrain's failure to provide appropriate IDE documentation and tutorials. So far, I haven't seen any improvements, it seems they value this topic less with each release. What a pitty.


Kind regards

Thomas Gülden
Munich, Germany

0
7 comments

Hello,
thanks Thomas for point this out.

I wanted to post to this forum very similar post.

I would like to work with JPA, EJB3, JSF and I was trying to find some good tutorial, showing how to work with these technologies effectively from Intellij Idea.
The only material about the J2EE and Web Development (obviously not with EJB3 etc.) I found shows how to work with Idea 6. And I realized that the way it works in Idea 7 is completely different.

I am comparing this support with Eclipse, I have also a new experience with JBuilder 2007 (JGear LiveSource) and I must say that I am very disappointed of the current documentation, tutorials provided for Intellij Idea 7.

Btw. I am also long-time user of Idea (started on 3.5).

Regards,
Milan

0
Avatar
Permanently deleted user

We're currently in the middle of updating the bundled Java EE documentation. Also, the most demanded topics will soon be posted on IntelliJ IDEA blog, including the updated live demo tutorials.

0
Avatar
Permanently deleted user

Well, I hope the effort you spend on it, will show sufficient results. Please, take a look at the help and material provided with MyEclipse. I hope that you would come to a status of similar quality and depth.

Kind regards

Thomas Gülden
Munich, Germany

0
Avatar
Permanently deleted user

What's the URL for this blog?

RRS

0
Avatar
Permanently deleted user

Hello Randall,

What's the URL for this blog?


http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"


0
Avatar
Permanently deleted user

Hi Dimitry

Please do not rely on the blog for documentation. The documentation should be available, when you work offline, i.e. without Internet connection, as well. Just to say, well, we have the blogs, is not sufficient (many newbies aren't even aware that the blogs exist).

Kind regards

Thomas Gülden
Munich, Germany

0
Avatar
Permanently deleted user

Thank you.

I don't think I've come across it before, so it's good to know about.

0

Please sign in to leave a comment.