search

MarketSquare / robotframeworkguides

A project to share guides and best practices for robot framework and its ecosystem
27 stars 54 forks source link

"I'm looking for RPA" is out of date and will turn away new users #71

Open burrk opened 6 days ago

burrk commented 6 days ago

https://docs.robotframework.org/docs/getting_started/rpa

The Robot Framework Guides still recommend using Robocorp RPA libraries, RCC, and the Automation Studio! Now that Robocorp is no longer maintaining the RPA.* Robot libraries and the Automation Studio is dead, this need to be replaced with something usable for RPA beginners, or at the very least removed.

P.S. I still like the RPA libraries, and I know they are not all dead, so it may be worth still mentioning them... but not RCC nor the Automation Studio.

burrk commented 6 days ago

P.S. The first paragraph on the main web page points to this page - which is really not good... https://robotframework.org/

simonmeggle commented 6 days ago

I agree to remove RPA libraries and Automation Studio. But RCC is still alive and imho completely underrated (not to say misunderstood sometimes...). Nevertheless, venv is the way to go for 97% of all RF users. For more complex deployments and special deployments, RCC is great. For that reason, I would still keep it in the list of tools for environment creation.

burrk commented 6 days ago

I wouldn't remove the RPA libraries. At least they should be left as a suggested set of libraries - they are great, some are still maintained, and I use them. They are just risky because of their uncertain maintenance future - and that is true for all open source projects to different degrees.

As the first link in the first paragraph on the main website, this guide needs to really be useful for people just looking to try out RF. And even if it was not linked to in such a prestigious spot, it is important functionality that needs a working help guide.

RCC is really powerful and let us get rid of most of the installation section of our internal setting up guide - but it also caused mind boggling problems with configurations getting messed up if you made a lot of changes. I didn't mind getting rid of it, even though raw pip has problems as well.

simonmeggle commented 6 days ago

Side note: yesterday I have released a docker-compose setup for rccremote with nginx and certificate support. With that rcc can fetch environment blueprints (Python, Nodejs, whatever) from a central host and create isolated environments in just a blink of an eye - without any internet connection.

https://github.com/elabit/rccremote-docker

(Just to give an example of rccs versatility and uniqueness)

burrk commented 6 days ago

There is already a PR "Reworked I am looking for RPA page" #44 that is failing the build (@emanlove) I think it really needs finishing.

B.T.W. this is in response to this discussion in Slack from a new user: https://robotframework.slack.com/archives/C3C28F9DF/p1731351243281209

d-biehl commented 6 days ago

@simonmeggle

Just to mention, rcc depends on a commercial manufacturer, has built-in commands that communicate with the manufacturer's cloud, and most importantly, it is no longer open source. The source code has been removed, and the license is now proprietary to the manufacturer and no longer an open-source license. I'm not sure whether one should refer to commercial, non-open-source compatible tools on a page that is about an open-source project.

burrk commented 6 days ago

@simonmeggle, based on @d-biehl's comment - I think rcc depends heavily on Conda for installation tasks - Does it do what you need?