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Success of Open Source Projects : all hail Spring

What makes an Open Source Project successful? When I started web frameworks with Struts 1.1 in 2004, I had a VERY hard time learning the framework. People who have been in the same boat would remember these key words "Struttin' with Struts" which would google to Rick Reumann's 4 or 5 chapter tutorial - that was by far the only DECENT tutorial available at that time. There may be more now, but I am not in the hunt.

At around the same time, Spring was coming up. And boy did it catch up like fire. The success story highlighted the importance of documentation. Rod Johnson's Team got it right in the first time. They realised that the popularity of an opensource project is directly proportional to the quality and quantity of its documentation. Ever since, you can see there are tons documentation for anything they release, in its own space. These include a lot of examples, code framgments etc. They still need centralise the individual projects to the main documentation page. Still, I think they are doing a good job.

So there you go, I let you out this little secret.. Good Documentation is well recieved.

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