My Experience with Daisy: Installation and First Use
I'm still a fan of the functionality that Daisy has implemented. But after having played with it for a bit, it seems to be somewhat less than optimal with respect to error handling and documentation.
In Daisy: WYSIWYG Wiki for PDF Books, I wrote up the most compelling reasons I could see for using Daisy. I was really worried, in fact. After getting my organization to begin moving towards DITA in a serious way, I was concerned that I might have found a tool that allows for collaboration as well as information reuse, and which had the additional benefit of being completely free!
So
far, at least, it seems that my worries were unfounded. As seductive as
the potential is, and after a couple days of trying, I've yet to put up
a system that others can use.
My observations so far:
- I pasted an 80-page HTML document into the editor, and it displayed perfectly. (Robust editor!)
- However, I then could not save the document. (Quelle problem!)
- I have no clue as to what error or errors were in the file though. The system just refused to save it.
- Not only that, it wasn't even clear there was an error.
Clicking "Save" just left me at the same screen until I clicked
Cancel--or deleted 79 pages and was left with something that could be saved.
- The installation instructions left out the pretty important part
where you actually start MySQL. (Ferreting that information out of the
MySQL docs took up an hour of the afternoon and morning I spent doing
a Unix install.)
- Many of the installation steps were documented well, and "just
worked". But several required a lot of time and experimentation. (For
MySQL, for example, just finding out what to download was no small
trick. That's not really Daisy's fault, but it's the kind of thing you
run into when you're dealing with a chain of open source applications.)
- The additional package you add for PDF images didn't happen to
mention that the self-install wants to update the JDK (as opposed to
putting the libraries somewhere and adjusting the classpath). I'm on a
shared Solaris system with symlinks to a read-only JDK, so that was a
dead end. So I wound up downloading a different package and manually
adjusting things.
- For part of the installation, I gave the address of my SMTP
server and the return address. But there was nowhere to specify the
protocol (SSL), port, or the username and password I need to use that
service. (The same would be true to access my ISP's mail server from my
windows box at home, so this isn't a Unix issue.)
- When I went to the config file, I saw entries for the values I entered, but no entries for the other values I need.
- Looking through the docs, I've yet to see anything on point. So I
guess I'll have to read the source code to find out what entries it can
handle. (If I have to extend the source code to get the notification
service working, that's a bit of a problem--especially since quite a
bit of additional work will be needed to figure out how to keep the password
secure.)
- Lacking notifications, users can't self-register. So I followed
the LDAP integration directions. The server connection is definitely
working. But for some reason it's rejecting username/password
combinations that are known to be valid. I don't have any idea why, nor
have I found any writeups that would help to troubleshoot the problem. (I finally handed out the root admin password, so others could play.)
I'll probably find solutions for most of the problems on a
mailing list somewhere. (I haven't joined one yet.) Either that, or it
will be a matter of reading the source code to find out how things
work--but while that's something I would expect to do to add some new
feature, it's rather disconcerting to be forced there just to get an
initial install operational.
Resources
-
Daisy: WYSIWYG Wiki for PDF Books
http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff/entry/daisy_wysiwyg_wiki_for_pdf
Thanks Eric for your summary. We are also looking at Daisy for OpenOffice as a potential system for collaborating on docs (but not DITA). I am yet to actually try out Daisy since I was unable to quickly install the beast so I postponed it for now. Your observations are most helpful.
Posted by Frank Peters on April 29, 2008 at 01:27 AM PDT #
I'm glad it helped. I'm still torn between taking a week or two to fight through the issues, so I can play with the cool functionality, or giving it up for now. I suspect that time pressures will force me to give it up, at least for the moment. (If I had the bucks I'd hire a consultant who knew enough to work around the problems!)
Posted by Eric Armstrong on April 29, 2008 at 11:43 AM PDT #
Hi Eric
Looks like you've gotten to the 'no free lunch' portion of your Daisy experience. I've been presenting Daisy with a caveat that it requires a technical orientation to get up and running -- my initial experience was similar to yours. I think the points in your post are all things that the Daisy guys should pay attention to from a usability perspective. OTOH, it's also true that this is not my primary focus.
To put this into perspective, it's a pretty short list of issues in exchange for a lot of (as you mentioned previously, free) functionality. If you can work through finding the community downloads and doing the JAVA and MySQL installs (isn't MySQL a Sun product now?) it really is possible to get a local PC copy of Daisy up and running in a few hours.
You then seem to have jumped immediately to the middle if not the deep end of the pool. Notifications are necessary for production, but not to play around with the cool publishing features. You're certainly also right about the errors. To then try to load an 80-page document, while a valid stress test, might seem a little beyond necessity for an initial test drive. I then don't think you had to delete 79 of the pages to save -- maybe 70? (PS - there are max doc sizes, which you can set.)
SMTP and LDAP integration are both issues in many environments. (After digging I discovered that the SMTP pw is not supported -- a fly in my ointment.)
One puzzling thing I stumbled on -- the Windows download that bundles MySQL and Java actually has an easy-to-use Windows installer. This makes the install much easier (for Windows users anyway). It should be highlighted in the install doc for Windows users.
It did not do a smooth job of integrating the MySQL install and starting MySQL -- I still prefer to do that separately (and MySQL's Windows install process seemed fine to me). But you can tell it (the Daisy installer) to use existing MySQL and Java, and then it does a very nice job of updating Java and installing Daisy. Of course that doesn't help non-Windows users.
My general sense is that this is the state of the art, the price you still have to pay for playing here at the moment. The community is very helpful by way of the mailing list, but everyone seems to have slightly different issues and the developers are stretched (not to mention trying to make a living!) As a result there is the feeling that you have to slog through some of these issues to get up and running.
Anyway, I appreciate your evaluation -- it's helpful to me as a Daisy user and consultant.
Peter
Posted by Peter Dykstra on May 01, 2008 at 07:48 AM PDT #
PS - I also agree that the docs make answers to these questions hard to find -- Daisy could use some structured documentation.
Posted by Peter Dykstra on May 01, 2008 at 08:02 AM PDT #