The Scrubyt Website has insufficient information
Reported by Sowmya | February 12th, 2009 @ 07:48 PM
Hi, I'm a newbie in the Ruby world, and I'm a QA Tester, ScRUBYt is the perfect solution for me. And i have rummaged almost everywhere to get help so that i can start using the scRUBYt. I have installed the required stuff like the latest version of Ruby, HPricot, Mechanize, Firewatir, DOM, Xpather etc, and so far i could run just one example sucessfully which never worked in the first place and then i joined the forum and eventually found the solution (i should say the hard way,.. believe me it wasnt easy). And apart from that no other examples work (atleast for me). And i'm totally lost. I believe that the scRUBYt requires a comprehensive tutorial starting from the Installation guide not some vague stuff like you have on the website. I have been using Watir to test the functionality of the software that we use at my work and I love the way they have made everything available on their website. Most importantly they have an online chat available for people who are stuck. When I started using watir i did not know anything about Ruby or anything related to it. In just 3 weeks i can write code to test anything and everything with Watir except that it cant help mw with scraping the websites like scRUBYt promises (i say this coz i am unable to use it so i dont know what it can do). I like the way the scRUBYt website looks but i think its almost useless atleast to me. It seems like you guys want to help only the people who know how to work with Ruby, Hpricot etc and not the newbies. Which is a shame. I started liking Ruby now i'm not so sure... I would very much like to see people like you creating something so wonderful like scRUBYt and i understand you guys are the creators but if its difficult for everybody to try it then... it like you guys want to play with ur own toys and not share them with others. That is all i have to say.
Comments and changes to this ticket
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Ryan Bigg February 12th, 2009 @ 09:44 PM
1) Paragraphs / line breaks. Use them.
2) Provide a link to the forum where you got your answer.
3) Show how the examples "don't work"
4) How can the website be improved?
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Peter Szinek February 19th, 2009 @ 12:51 AM
- State changed from “new” to “resolved”
Thanks for the feedback!
Yes I know (it's quite apparent) that the documentation is sorely lacking / non existent / whatever. However, as you know this is open source software which means several things:
1) I am not getting paid for it so it's not easy to find time to work on the project, let alone the documentation 2) It also means that everybody is free to contribute. scRUBYt! is a 2+ years old project, yet I have received almost no contributions, while putting hundreds of hours into the development and giving it away all for free.
Right now the focus is on a bottom-up rewrite (scRUBYt! 0.5.0) which will have a good documentation (if for no other reason, it's developed BDD style with RSpec so at very least you can check out the test output). Making 0.5 happen eats up all our time, and I feel that I am still spending much more time with the current version (maintaining, bugfixing, even adding new features now and then) than I should - once 0.5.0 will be out, it will totally replace the old scRUBYt! branch, which changed really a lot, which is also a reason for no/little/inconsistent documentation etc. Of course if someone is willing to help with the documentation, I am sure everyone will be glad. However, I have too much on my plate, given the above situation, to write documentation for a soon-to-become-obsolete version.
There is always the mailing list: I am trying to answer all the questions there, even if it takes some time usually (esp. if I got a lot of questions at once, combined with a lot of other tasks etc.).
Last, but not least: if you don't like it, don't use it. You can even bitch about it if that makes you feel better, it's up to you :-) I am really trying to put as much time into it as possible, but I have other chores obviously as well.
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A simple to learn and use, yet powerful web scraping toolkit written in Ruby.
Peter Szinek