Users' Guide (Draft)

1. Introduction

This page explains how to use the Count From Zero (CFZ) website. CFZ provides a community for software engineers and the publishers of their tools. The primary feature is the directory of programming libraries and APIs. See the about page for more details. Check out the advertiser and publisher pages for information about CFZ's objectives. For communications email cfz@countfromzero.biz.

CFZ provides two primary types of content pages: packages and categories. Package pages contain all the data CFZ publishes for a particular software package, while the category pages list packages and subcategories within the category.

Notes about the package pages:

1. The release date refers to the date of the latest release, not of the first release.
2. Currently CFZ caters to Java. CFZ contains some packages for other languages, but not many.
3. CFZ identifies ten types of software licenses. CFZ does not support multi-licensing yet, so only one license will be noted. See section 2 for more details on licenses.
4. CFZ records five types of relationships between packages. These relationships are identified in section 3. The relationship section only displays if applicable.

Notes about the category pages:

1. The columns containing "H" and "D" are links to the homepage and download page respectively.
2. If a category contains subcategories then a subcategory section and a tree view section will be visible. The subcategory section lists the immediate subcategories while the tree view section provides information about all subcategories down to the leaves. Tree views are explained in section 4.

2. License Types

Listings for shareware always use the license status applicable after purchase.

license terminology

1. commercial released by an organization rather than an individual. Paid support usually available.
2. cost only available for a fee. Assumes registration and commercial support.
3. open source source code available. Does not imply rights to redistribute or modify.
4. registration disclosure of personal information required before use.

licenses

1. closed source freely available without source code or commercial support.
2. commercial freely available without source code and with commercial support.
3. commercial, open source freely available with source code and commercial support.
4. commercial, open source, registration freely available with source code and commercial support and requires registration.
5. commercial, registration freely available without source code, with commercial support, and requires registration.
6. cost available at a price without source code.
7. cost, open source available at a price with source code (very rare).
8. open source freely available with source code.
9. open source, registration freely available with source code and requires registration.
10. registration freely available without source code and requires registration.

3. Package Relationships

A package relationship always consists of two packages, a parent and a child. The parent identifier is listed first.

1. required by/requires child has compile or run-time dependencies on parent but is otherwise unrelated.
2. extended by/extends child adds functionality to parent and cannot operate without parent.
3. forked by/forks child started a new version of the parent and the parent is still maintained.
4. succeeded by/succeeds child started a new version of the parent and the parent is not maintained.
5. compatibility/compatible with child provides an interface to operate with parent but can function independently.

4. Tree Views

1. packages/alphabetical alphabetical list of packages.
2. packages/categorical list of subcategories and the packages containing them. Not yet implemented.
3. categories/alphabetical alphabetical list of categories with statistics.
4. categories/categorical view of the entire subtree structure for the category with statistics.