Querki for the Impatient

Status: right now, Querki for the Impatient is only half-finished; it is incomplete, and frankly needs a bunch of editing and restructuring. I have put it on hold because I expect to be rewriting the Editor heavily in the coming months. Once that is done, I expect to get back to this guide. For the moment, take it for what it is worth, and see Querki Quickstart for an even more concise introduction.

Welcome to Querki!

As this is being written, Querki is preparing to open its Alpha release. As we do so, I suddenly realized that we need to have some documentation about how to use it. I've been burbling for months in the development journal about how it works, but it hasn't previously been written up in a way that somebody could digest reasonably fast.

The goal of this book is to provide a flying introduction, of enough Querki to begin building interesting and useful Spaces. It is modeled on the excellent Scala for the Impatient, which I recommend to any Java programmer who wants to learn a lot of cool new stuff. We're not going to discuss anywhere near all of Querki, but we're going to touch on all the high points and provide examples.

The target audience here is specifically programmers, or at least people with some experience with code. In the medium term, Querki is going to be for everybody -- we are specifically aiming to make it easy enough that somebody with no experience or interest in programming can do useful things here -- but that's a ways off yet, and there is a lot of design and wizard-writing to do before it's plausible. So for now, building interesting things in Querki requires at least not being afraid of code.

I specifically assume that you have some experience with object-oriented languages. It doesn't matter much which, but I'm going to toss around terms like "object" and "class" pretty freely, so Java background is helpful. That said, keep in mind that Querki is very, very different from Java, or SQL, or HTML -- it steals ideas from all of these and more, and reblends them to get something that is much quicker and easier to use.

While far from complete, these is going to go into some depth. I'm assuming that you want to understand Querki well enough to build interesting things in it. So this will go into a lot of details that the later end users (who are mostly using pre-built Apps) will just gloss over. Expect to take an hour or two working through this guide. That said, in an hour or two you'll have everything you need to start building real Spaces, and those will take only minutes to set up.

And if you're really impatient: just jump straight into the examples. The surrounding text gets into what's going on here, and provides a better understanding of why it works the way it does, but the examples serve as a quick ten-minute tutorial on how to use the system. That's enough to get you up and running.

I strongly encourage you to ask questions. Eventually we're going to have full-fledged community forums here, but in the meantime I encourage you to follow the development journal, and ask questions there, or write to me directly at justin-at-querki-dot-net.