Has everyone else noticed that Hibernate documentation is really weak? I've tried using these forums before, but never got responses. I have better luck getting responses from the Sun Java Forums even when asking Hibernate specific questions. I've noticed that the majority of Hibernate Forums questions get 0 or 1 repsonse. Very few generate good discussion.

A coworker that used to use Hibernate Forums claims that she was raked across the coals after asking what the Hibernate team thought was a stupid question. Perhaps this type of verbal abuse is what scares people from replying. I think even a partially correct reply to a question could be more helpful than the silence that most posting generate.

A concerned user,
favphot

P.S. PLEASE post your thoughts if you have an opinion on this topic. If no replies are posted, I guess it only adds evidence for my comments.

Most of us do this voluntarily in our spare time while at work. Who knows what drives us to respond to the posts we do and and the posts we don't. I'm sure every poster has different views, peculiar little dislikes and likes that determine what we try to answer and what we ignore.

Sometimes we just aren't sure about the answer, or sometimes we are too busy, or sometimes the answer can be given in a simple link to the documentation with no accompanying text. But we do get some people who come on here and start handing out insults, and the occasional cheap C1aLi5 ad. We don't take them personally, nor should anyone take any responses personally because it's just a message board on this series of tubes we call the internets.

The best way to get responses is to be brief and concise and do as much narrowing down before you post. The last thing most people want to do is scrub through all 342 hbm.xml files, your own session management code, 600 lines of java, and 4 megs of log file text to find you didn't capitalize the first letter of a class in your hql query which isn't posted. From here, it's all chance, but a good chance.

I totally agree with Chris.

This is a community help by people who are not paid for this, it's their / my free time.

Speaking for myself: I answer posts that are concise and where I can post an answer without setting up a test case or something like that (sometimes I do that but only for interesting problems).

Cheers,
Mike

Behind me is a shelf with about half a meter of Hibernate books, probably more than 5000 pages total. I've personally written more than 2000 pages of Hibernate documentation.

Of course, we always need more help to extend the bundled reference documentation. Volunteering?

By the way, the metrics I extract from the forum database (several years worth of data) tell me a few things:

- the number of postings/day has been going up every single months (often significantly)

- the number of initial postings that get a response has also been increasing

- the chance of getting a reply is now much higher, with the introduction of the credit system 1.5 years ago

In other words: Your subjective feeling, or your coworkers experience, does not reflect reality.

i agree with christian ..hibernate is one the most well documented open src java project out there ...

I have every book out there that has the word hibernate in it ( including christian's new one ) ...but of the 5000 pages that he mentioned 4500 talk about the same stuff over and over...

As for the documentation issue...

I agree that Hibernate is one of the most heavily documented open-source projects. However, don't confuse quantity with quality.

You can get very far with the reference documentation. If you need more information you can get Java Persistence With Hibernate, which is a book that will give you an excellent understanding of Hibernate and ORM in general. Of course there are some crappy books out there but that is something Hibernate can't be blamed for.