My experience with OH after 3 months (for those who still hesitate and don't know where to start from)

It is still there in 2.5.5 That is what new users are using now. :wink:

I plan on creating some of these but i won’t bother until Openhab 3 is out otherwise the UI will be completely different and the videos are no longer useful. I think this is holding back a lot of videos from getting produced as it is a lot of work to create a decent video that will need to be redone when 3 is released.

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Documentation too.

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To be fair, a lot of documentation is done (and imho very well done…) :slight_smile:

Officially approved videos would boost confidence in the content.

True, but for OH 3:

  • the Beginner’s Tutorial needs a complete rewrite
  • rules docs will need a complete rewrite, or at a minimum an additional set of docs written; the reference stuff is largely there but the discussion about how to approach rules (event driven and such) isn’t there
  • we will need another migration tutorial
  • Actions work significantly differently which needs to be discussed
  • Sitemaps will have a GUI based way to build them now which needs to be discussed
  • Federating with OH1/OH2 to continue to use 1.x version bindings needs to be added to the docs (most of the docs are written, though people seem unhappy with the requirement on MQTT so someone may replace it which will itself need to be documented)
  • User and role management
  • The new UI needs to be documented, though from what I’ve played with so far it’s pretty intuitive; but I already know too much and am not a great judge for what a new user would think.

There is lots to do and we are kind of in a holding pattern until stuff settles down a bit before we can really start in earnest.

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I think they expect it to be developed here.

It’s only an alternative to the current way (writing .sitemap files) which will still be supported but you’re still right.

It’s steadily getting there, some early adopters are starting to use it in production, especially now that https://github.com/openhab/openhab-core/pull/1451 got merged a few days ago - the NGRE (not so “NG” anymore) is now the only rule engine, and your DSL rules in .rules files run through it. They also appear in the UI and you can disable/enable them, or run them manually (but not edit them from the UI, same as items or things when they come from files). You can also use create rules in the UI and use the rule DSL (and Jython or other script engines) as an alternative to JS for scripting.

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Guess I’ll have to contribute heavily to the beginner’s tutorial or write it myself, since it will likely be heavily UI-driven. But it’s a little early to write it now since there will likely be an “onboarding” wizard when you start openHAB for the first time (which is not done now) so it would influence the tutorial. There’s a lot of new stuff with the new pages concept for the UI and some of it can be quite obscure so I’ll have to do some write-up on that too.

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Awesome! I’ve only been partially following the github discussions. Glad to see Rules DSL will still have support.

Even if it’s just outlines and bullet points about certain things that you want to be sure get addressed or emphasized I’m sure we can fill out the details.

There is one thing I’ve lost the ball on which I’m sure you can answer as the UI guy. What about Persistence? Still file based configured or is there a UI now?

I’ve not been running with OH 3 yet but will probably switch over soon and start creating some stubs for docs we can build upon. I just checked and there is a Docker image which will make it nice and easy. :smiley:

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Is it true that the version of some bindings is several months older than the OH2 version?
It was just a rumor I heard.

Unfortunately still file based for now, there’s no API - however every item gets automatic RRD4j persistence with no configuration with some sensible defaults if the addon is installed (and it is by default). It’s probably enough for most users.
To tell you the truth I’ve been running OH3 as my daily driver since mid-April and I have not written any configuration file yet - ate my own dogfood and recreated everything from scratch with the UI and some JS rules - and I couldn’t be happier, it boots up fast and the lag I had with the old rules engine is gone. But I’m aware doing everything with the UI is not going to be for everybody.

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Mmh, not that I know of. The Jenkins job converts all OH2 addons to be OH3-compatible, there are some problems with Z-Wave and Zigbee at the moment and I think the nest binding was disabled for a while, but every other binding is the current version in the OH3 snapshots.

Thanks.

I know the database of supported devices is part of the zwave binding, hence my concern.

@ysc They look old to me…

OH 3 .
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OH 2.5
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At least Zigbee binding has been removed temporary from openHAB 3.0 distro, see

Exactly, when I tried out homeassistant the quality and content of the documentation was a fraction of the openhab documentation. I was puzzled how anybody could get anything to work.
The openhab documentation is indeed great!

That’s a very good idea, we could work on some Wiki topics here on the forum, for the specific purpose of coming up with a good new user tutorial as a community, since the barrier to entry is lower here than on GitHub, then once it’s in a good shape we can migrate it to the docs - it’s Markdown in both cases after all so it should work. I’ll start some wikis in the UI category in the next few days.

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I’ve created a number of pages in the docs (1.x to 2.0 Migration tutorial, Ephemeris documentation, etc.) using just this approach. It works out well, though very few users will actually edit the OP even though it’s a wiki which is frustrating.

Yeah I’ve noticed the same with the topics I made, maybe because the prose was already “good enough” so people think they would overstep if they dare edit it, perhaps if it’s clear that it’s not final (i.e. bullet points only to be expanded into real sentences) it could get more contributions, I don’t know.

6 posts were split to a new topic: OH3 and the NGRE