Servoy Forum

Hello,

I'm having some trouble building Servoy with sources from Github on Eclipse for the LTS version.

The documentation disappeared on the wiki for latest Servoy releases and the last I could find is for Servoy 7:
https://wiki.servoy.com/display/Serv7/Setting+Up

Is this something you still support and maintain?

Thanks in advance

Hi João,

I'm curious why do you want to run the IDE from source? What problem will this solve for you?
(It is possible, but is quite tricky and uncommon)

Best,
Sean

You didn't answer my question

So mostly 3 things:
- Debug plugins / beans when we have very tricky problems (we can just set breakpoints in our code while running Servoy directly)
- Debug Servoy behavior (if something it's not documented or difficult to understand, as a last resource you can check the sources and debug the code)
- we did a small customization some time ago on smart client that we maintain

I'm currently reevaluating if there's other way to do the same customization with standard Servoy functionality on the latest versions so it will work with NG / TiNG.

But while evaluating my options, it's important to know if the building from sources is something we can count on

Hi João, we provide this info on-request. I sent it to you in a direct message.

Best,
Sean

Hi Sean,
"on-request" is not good enough IMHO.
You are so far gone from the big fanfare announcements a few years ago that Servoy was going to be Open Source that it's not even funny.
This is exactly why most Java developers who might have been interested in the Servoy platform have left the premises.

Hi Patrick,

Regarding the question of Servoy's commitment to being open source:
Over the past few years, Servoy has created well over 100 public repositories on GitHub.

Anyway, I feel bad that you see it this way. We removed the documentation in question because it's quite advanced and more people found it by accident (and were mislead by it) than on-purpose. I must agree with you, that it is "not good enough" and we haven't yet updated it and found a better home for it.

Best,
Sean

Hi Sean.

Indeed, I strongly feel that this kind of information should be public, not shared on demand.

If the only problem is to find a place that is not to be found by accident and confuse users, I suppose (and Robert Ivens will be able to confirm this) that a good place to put this information would be on ServoyForge.
We could open a specific project with a wiki that could be used to document the steps needed to run Servoy from the sources.

Best,
-Patrick

Having documentation 'on-request' for an Open Source project is very weird. In fact it's a big no-no for Open Source.
Lots of developers dump their code on the internet and say it's 'Open Source', while in fact making something Open Source means work. You need to provide documentation, answer questions, review patches/pull requests and generally maintain your code. It's work, and for some projects it's a LOT of work.
If you don't have the bandwidth to do all this then don't open source your code.

Servoy has over 100 public repositories. But, to be honest, the documentation on it is very poor. Source code alone is no substitute for documentation and still that is what we mostly have to resort to to be able to understand what it does and can do.
As I understand Servoy is working on consolidating the documentation and hopefully make it more complete, perhaps they can then also update the documentation for the Servoy code and make it publicly available again.

ptalbot wrote:If the only problem is to find a place that is not to be found by accident and confuse users, I suppose (and Robert Ivens will be able to confirm this) that a good place to put this information would be on ServoyForge.
We could open a specific project with a wiki that could be used to document the steps needed to run Servoy from the sources.

Yes, we will be happy to create a project for it on ServoyForge.

HI Robert,

Thanks for your feedback. Servoy is actively expanding its team to increase efforts with documentation.

In the meantime, I've attached to this post a PDF guide for setting up the IDE to run from source.
You are also welcome to use this information on ServoyForge.

Best,
Sean