[rabbitmq-discuss] Thoughts from a new user

[Adam Nelson]

Hello,

I've been using RabbitMQ for 2 months now and I figured I would share my
experiences.

== Background ==

I'm using RabbitMQ because Celery recommends it.  If Celery recommended
something else, I would have used that.  I'm just pointing that out because
sometimes core services forget that people often use them because a
particular library favors that implementation.  It's important to take care
of the downstream libraries, especially when you're using an open protocol
like AMQP.

== Comments so Far ==

I think RabbitMQ is awesome and has done really well so far for me.  It's
been very fast (only marginally important for me) and very stable (much,
much more important for me).  Here's my constructive criticism (i.e. things
that can be addressed easily IMHO).

 * This newsgroup format is terrible.  Please move to Google Groups.
 * The code is very difficult to get at.  Please move to Github (or
BitBucket).  I see that you're using Mercurial already, so BitBucket is the
obvious choice.  I think GitHub is way more feature rich but if you're not
willing to move to Git, that won't work of course.
 * The documentation is not version-specific.  This has caused me enormous
problems (specifically with set-permissions, which is why I'm in the mode to
write this message at all).  Please move to a platform that supports
versioned documentation better.  I don't know the best solution to this
exactly - maybe Sphinx or just a wiki with a url structure that supports
multiple versions?
 * Where are the open tickets?  It appears that all bugs are going through
the mailing list - it's really hard on the users to not have an
easy-to-search ticket system.  Launchpad could work or BitBucket's issue
system, or Redmine, or Trac?
 * The site itself needs a fresh look.  I know MongoDB is funded, but
there's an example of a great site for this type of thing:
http://www.mongodb.org/ .
 * Outdated stuff should be taken down or have a disclaimer on it.  For
instance the ec2 page: http://www.rabbitmq.com/ec2.html has images for
Karmic Koala.  While that was great last year, it's really time to have a
Lucid ec2 images available - or nothing at all.  A Lucid image, because it
is long term, could be up for a year or two and it would be ok.
 * Please don't tell Mac users to use MacPorts:
http://www.rabbitmq.com/macports.html It's time to move them to HomeBrew at
http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
 * Please be more descriptive about how to set up an environment with tools
like Alice and Wonderland.  These appear to be great assets to RabbitMQ, but
are hidden in the dense 'Getting Started' page:
http://www.rabbitmq.com/how.html .  All the links from a Getting Started
page should take no longer than 1 hour to read.  Check out Django's one hour
intro here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/  .  The
first link on RabbitMQ's Getting Started page goes to this Alexis Richardson
talk -
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/erlang/alexis-richardson-introduction-to-rabbitmq
.  While the content is great, it's geared towards the intermediate user,
not a beginner just getting started.  Also, having dynamic delicious
searches is fine for an appendix maybe, but not the first page for people
getting started.

In fine, I really think the product is tremendous, it's just a matter of
fixing up the experience for users of the software.  The core issues are
documentation (plenty of it is there, almost too much, but not tightly
curated, updated or kept versioned), code access (archaic tools around this
- although using Mercurial is a huge plus over cvs or svn), and issue
tracking.

Thanks,
Adam


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-- 
Adam
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