[PEAK] Proposal for another Wiki "tutorial"

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 08:42 PM 7/13/04 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
>I'm thinking of putting another tutorial-style series of pages on the
>Wiki. I'm not experienced in PEAK, so it's from the perspective of
>someone who is learning as they go along. What I'm thinking of doing
>is developing an application, working from the "core" PEAK modules
>outwards. I don't know how practical this is, but it feels OK -
>component based design, then protocols, binding to join things
>together, then naming and config to make the whole thing configurable.
>Add running and commands for a standard runtime approach, and maybe
>logs to add logging. Luckily (given the current state of flux) I don't
>think that storage will need to figure strongly in my application.
>
>The application I have in mind is basically a server monitoring tool -
>send "pings" to a set of servers and collect the results back. It's a
>real-life application for me (or at least a variation on one) so it
>would hopefully be a little less artificial than "Hello, world" (not
>to take anything from the excellent existing tutorial).
>
>I'm not sure how this will go (I'll be writing as I build, so I
>haven't made the mistakes yet!)
>
>Does this sound like a worthwhile project?

Sounds great.  I think one of the really cool bits of IntroToPeak is that 
it always has a working example that delivers value.  The place I always 
seem to go wrong in writing these things is that I take too long to get to 
real examples.

Anyway, I'd suggest that rather than having a completely "from scratch" 
tutorial, you might do one that starts where the end of IntroToPeak lesson 
1 leaves off.  IOW, the user has a working PEAK installation and knows how 
to run a program under the 'peak' script, with a skeletal configuration 
file.  From there, you can take your own direction, as sort of an alternate 
"trail" or "track".

But please don't let my suggestion interfere with your own vision, and 
definitely not with your motivation!  Do as you think best, and the 
community will surely be the richer for it.