Runnable example library for Apache Java frameworks

The moment a developer picks up Apache Shiro, OFBiz, or MINA in a real project, they quickly exhaust the official docs — which describe what classes exist but rarely show how to wire them together for anything non-trivial. They search, find nothing recent, and either waste days reverse-engineering source code or abandon the framework entirely.

The gap persists for a structural reason: Apache projects are volunteer-maintained. The people who deeply understand a framework are contributors, not technical writers, and writing worked examples is unglamorous work that doesn't advance the codebase. Nobody owns 'developer experience' — the PMC tracks bugs and releases, not onboarding success rates. That means the documentation debt accumulates indefinitely, because the people who feel the pain (new adopters) are exactly the people who can't fix it.

What's missing isn't more reference documentation — it's runnable, tested, real-scenario examples. Not 'here is the API signature' but 'here is a working Spring Boot app using Apache Shiro for JWT-based role authorization with a database-backed realm, cloneable from GitHub, tested against the last three minor versions.' Users explicitly asked for 'more screenshots,' 'simple examples,' and 'documentation for major updates' — meaning they want something they can see working before they trust it.

This is a business and not a feature because the need recurs every release cycle. When Apache Cayenne ships a major version, the example library needs to be updated and re-validated — that's ongoing work nobody at Apache is paid to do. A company that owns this can charge the developers and teams who depend on these frameworks to move fast, and the cost of not having it (days of debugging, failed evaluations, wrong architectural choices) is real and recurring.

What to build

Build a searchable, version-tagged repository of tested, runnable code examples for Apache Java frameworks — organized by use-case scenario rather than by API class — where each example is CI-tested against the framework version it documents and linked directly from a browsable web index.

Where to start

Start with Apache Shiro specifically — it has the broadest non-Apache adoption (used outside the Apache ecosystem in standalone Spring apps), the most active Stack Overflow traffic with unanswered questions, and the sharpest pain around advanced features like custom realms and JWT integration, which the official docs barely touch.

The hard part

Keeping examples green across framework versions is the core operational burden — a CI pipeline that tests 12 frameworks across multiple versions is expensive to maintain and will break constantly, so the first painful trade-off is deciding how many frameworks to cover at launch before the maintenance cost kills margins.

How it makes money

Free tier covers the three most popular frameworks with basic examples; paid subscription ($19–49/month per developer or team license) unlocks the full library, version-specific example diffs on each release, and priority request queue for new scenarios.