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A.V. Ajax Toolkit for Eclipse - Mandatory and unsupported at the same time?
I first added this as a comment to the Toolkit main page on the Wiki, but then removed thinking that it is a critical comment and I do not want to offend people that are working hard on the toolkit. I still want to address this question and therefore posting here for discussion.
Regarding the last edition of the Toolkit:
I feel that it is a bit perplexing when Apex Toolkit is declared mandatory tool in order to publish Apex code to production instances and at the same time is unsupported "try and your own risk" type tool. I have used it before, and found it a very good tool. However, it does have bugs and I feel it is lacking transparency and well defined processes to support it. We had issues with new release when due to modified behavior of the toolkit, undesired changes have been pushed into production. That may have been also an overlook in part of our admin, but I feel that better communication, documentation and release notes could help avoid potentially serious production issues. As this tool is becoming a must have for any development it must evolve to become more reliable, well-documented and supported.
Any comments or disagreements on this?
Regarding the last edition of the Toolkit:
I feel that it is a bit perplexing when Apex Toolkit is declared mandatory tool in order to publish Apex code to production instances and at the same time is unsupported "try and your own risk" type tool. I have used it before, and found it a very good tool. However, it does have bugs and I feel it is lacking transparency and well defined processes to support it. We had issues with new release when due to modified behavior of the toolkit, undesired changes have been pushed into production. That may have been also an overlook in part of our admin, but I feel that better communication, documentation and release notes could help avoid potentially serious production issues. As this tool is becoming a must have for any development it must evolve to become more reliable, well-documented and supported.
Any comments or disagreements on this?
The Eclipse toolkit will be offical/supported in the (near, hopefully) future. We are reworking the code and fixing bugs actively now (and adding new features!). I'd encourage you to let us know about any specific issues you find so we can make sure we route them to development.
If I dig up the specifics of the issues we saw, I will be sure to share.