[HTTPCLIENT-1201] provide basic documentation in an obvious place

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 4.2 Final
• Fix Version/s: 4.2.1
• Component/s: Documentation
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: miles zarathustra
• Created: 01/Jun/12 05:09
• Updated: 05/Oct/13 19:41
• Resolved: 27/Jun/12 09:38

Description

The only documentation obviously linked from the main HttpClient page is the "tutorial." This "tutorial" talks about a lot of esoteric arcane junk I don't care about, but gives no clue on how to send parameters via a basic post. For that, I have to go here:

http://wiki.apache.org/HttpComponents/QuickStart

It's very difficult to find, and it's a lot easier to google examples that don't work. I wound up trying 4 different purported solutions before I found this one that works. If you look around the web you'll notice that people generally find the httpclient documentation frustrating. I have colleagues who argue that it would be easier to just write the post logic from scratch than figure out how the silly apache stuff works, and it's difficult for me to contradict them.

It would be SO easy to improve the situation by making links to already available examples of the basic operations in an obvious place.

The FAQ that explains some things about WHY the posts work in the totally non-intuitive way that they do would be nice also.

Thanks.