Who are you going to "complain" to? Remember that Jakarta is a free open-source software project. Nobody gets paid for what they do. It is not commercial software that is intended for general computer users; it is a reference implementation targeted to developers, who presumably will take the initiative to dig a little deeper. The main focus is on fixing bugs and providing functionality, not providing commercial quality automatic installation procedures. For that, you have to pay for a commercial product.
Very often, configuration problems are caused by using old, buggy releases. I have found that the latest Tomcat 4.0 beta 3 installs quite easily. Just unzip the zipfile, set the "JAVA_HOME" and "CATALINA_HOME" environment variables, and run "startup.bat". There's no excuse for not being able to figure out how the classpath is set, for example - a .bat file can be read line for line. There are no hidden, proprietary parts.
In a
community of developers, it can't be a one-way street. It is reasonable to expect everybody to contribute and to make efforts to learn, as well as to receive help from other developers - that's why it's all free. All the source code, documentation, and tools in Jakarta are available for download and inspection. If you don't understand a feature, you can read the source code. If you can provide a fix, a new feature, or an improved procedure, you can contribute it to the project and become part of the ever-expanding development team. This is a very different model than the vendor-customer relationship.
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Phil Hanna
Sun Certified Programmer for the
Java 2 Platform
Author of :
JSP: The Complete Reference
Instant Java Servlets Website:
http://www.philhanna.com