Newer version of the book?

[aadrian]

Any plans publishing a newer version of the book Griffon in Action ?
(with newer code examples too)

Thank you.

[aalmiray]

There are no concrete plans to write a second edition of the book yet. The tutorial (http://griffon-framework.org/tutorials/) section at the project's site cover the basics. Most of what it's described in the book regarding runtime aspects still applies, the buildtime of course is totally different and no longer valid.

[allquixotic]

My team would definitely be interested in buying a few copies of an updated Griffon in Action book (but we are a small team of 5). We'd gladly pay full price for the update to make it worth the authors' time.

May I suggest starting an Indiegogo campaign for it? Rails Composer was recently successfully funded for an update via Indiegogo (it came close to not getting funded, but people stepped up at the last minute to make it happen). You would make the bare minimum required to fund the book if the Indiegogo campaign succeeded, and then make slow residual sales over time from post-campaign sales.

P.S. My team is only interested in the eBook. We print a couple pages from the PDF here and there as needed but prefer not to waste trees and wait for books to travel through snail mail. :) I would recommend any update not go to physical print unless you really get a strong interest in it, because it's more cost for you to print them and not sell them... the only cost of producing a PDF/ePub book is time.

[aalmiray]

As far as I can tell, writing an updated version of "Griffon in Action" requires involvement of the publishing house (Manning) due to contractual obligations. Can't tell for sure how much of the source material can be used to produce a non-Manning related edition (if indiegogo, leanpub, or other) was produced. The inability to use the original source material will result in a slower start but it's not a hard impediment.

Perhaps an indiegogo campaign as you suggest, coupled with gitbook could work.

[aalmiray]

Besides further information on testing (and the missing deployment chapter (see #120)) what else would be needed in the Griffon Guide?

[allquixotic]

I think some information similar to what you wrote here would be useful in the guide.

One of the issues we grappled with (and I'm sure others will too) when first starting to use Griffon, is Java vs. Groovy and JavaFX vs. Swing (or even Maven vs. Gradle!). All the different choices mean that for most operations you have to give a bunch of different examples depending on the user's preference.

Selenium has a similar situation, where they have bindings for many different programming languages. They solve it using some clever HTML to allow the user to choose which language they want the samples to be displayed in. That would be awesome if it could be added to the Griffon Guide. That way, the same content is presented throughout, in exactly (and only) the environment that the user cares about, so if I'm using Swing I won't see anything about JavaFX.

See the "Programming Language Preference" widget here for an example of how Selenium did it. Microsoft has a similar thing in MSDN for many .NET examples for C#/VB/F#.

For Griffon, you'd unfortunately need four examples to cover the main cases: Java/Swing, Java/JavaFX, Groovy/Swing, and Groovy/JavaFX. Painful, I know, but Selenium actually has seven programming languages in the official docs, so it wouldn't be the worst thing anyone's ever done... :)