| [mat-dev] Refreshing MAT's web pages |
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Hi, A few days ago I started cleaning up the MAT web site and wiki pages. There were a number of broken links, outdated information, very old styling theme, etc … I am not capable of creating a really good and modern looking page, therefore I focused on cleaning up broken stuff and trying to put some better structure. Here is a summary of what changed so far: -
Updated the home page
https://www.eclipse.org/mat/ to use similar styling as most of the other projects –
the “solstice” theme. Again, it is not the super-good-looking page, but at least we are not two themes behind most of the other eclipse projects -
Used the navigation bar on the top, which comes with the new theme, to structure groups of links related to
developers/contributors, documentation, support. The info/links was available already before, but spread unstructured across our home page
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Removed the links to previous presentations from the home page (the newest one was 2010), created a wiki page with the still working links, and linked it under documentation as additional learning material.
They were a few links which didn’t work any longer. For some I managed to find the replacement, the others I deleted. If you happen to know some new tutorial or presentation which we could link – let me know. A couple of weeks ago I was at EclipseCon Europe and was pleasantly surprised to be in two sessions:
https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2016/session/optimising-eclipse-plug-ins and
https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2016/session/performance-testing-budget . -
I removed the links to the webinars. The links to adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com are not responding any longer. I spend some time looking for new links to the old info, but found none. If anyone has an idea
where to find them (e.g. the adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com/p76554151/ one) let me know. -
On the wiki (linked as Getting Started) I tried to keep the Getting started part minimal – install and a links to two (in my opinion) good first-reading materials. Please have a look and let me know if you still find some broken links / wrong data! Suggestions for improvement are also welcome! Some further changes I will try to do (and I need some help): -
On the wiki we still have a lengthy “Getting a Heap Dump” description
https://wiki.eclipse.org/MemoryAnalyzer#Getting_a_Heap_Dump . This is pretty much the same as the one in the documentation within MAT, which is also available online:
http://help.eclipse.org/neon/topic/org.eclipse.mat.ui.help/tasks/acquiringheapdump.html . In addition, both descriptions look quite outdated – they are mostly talking about java 1.4 to 1.6, there is java 8 beta mentioned on one place, there are some descriptions
specific to MAT 1.2 and 1.3, etc… While most of the information is still correct, it leaves the impression that the info is out-of-date
o
I will try to update the description – add some details about java 8, remove the paragraphs about MAT 1.2, etc…
o
I would appreciate if one of the IBM colleagues can check if the descriptions for using IBM dumps are still fine and update if necessary (also add new java versions to the list if needed)
o
The open question is where to fix it – at the end I see no use in having the info maintained twice. I would like to have an up-to-date documentation within the tool, and have it also online. The issue is, that
with our release tempo, the next online version of the docu will be June 2017, and I’d like to have the update sooner than that. I am thinking about fixing both documentation and Wiki and then removing the Wiki once we have an online version of the documentation
which is up-to-date. If we manage to do improvements to the doc, we could probably
o
Talking about java versions and heap dumps – we’ll have to watch how java 9 evolves and see if there are some changes relevant for MAT -
Another piece of documentation which needs to be refreshed is the
contributor guide. I’d like to review it again and come up with an up-to-date description. This would need more time, so let’s see if I manage to get to it. Feedback is welcome! Krum |