Hi All, Wanted to summarize some of what Dale, Will and I chatted about this evening with regard to Edgent and some ideas on how to move Edgent forward.
I'll be honest, when I read the conflicting info from Kathey and in person description from Justin I thought there was something awry, so I did want to dig in further to having a full in depth dump of ideas. It seems to me that the disconnect is around past contributors vs active contributors. >From what was described the only active contributor is Dale, whereas others have contributed to the project in different ways (Will seems to be doing some evangelism, Kathey's helped with documentation to name it a bit). In the past there was a bit more outside delivery but at the end of day its not even a single company but a single contributor doing most of the work. While its clear to me that the project gets The Apache Way, until there's a bigger developer community I would be hesitant to say the podling is completely ready to go. Looking across Edgent, there's some clear areas of improvement for the podling. I'll list them below in no particular order, and ignoring that I've already spoken in person about some of these (just to make it clear that it's also happening on list): - Downloads are an issue. First problem is that the links from http://edgent.apache.org/docs/downloads are pointing to directories on dist.a.o instead of the direct downloads makes it harder for a user to leverage Edgent. Even then, the fact that the project is not distributed in a repository manager (e.g. Maven) makes leveraging it even harder. - There's some website branding issues, but not issues in the "this is wrong" sense but more "this is weird" sense. For instance, there's two different themes from what I can tell, comparing http://edgent.apache.org/docs/downloads and the main http://edgent.apache.org/ the fact that there's two different color schemes makes it feel like two different sites. The same color scheme, logos etc should be in use. - Figure out a way to build synergy with existing ASF projects over demoing with commercial entities. I threw out the idea to use Apache ActiveMQ Artemis for MQTT based communication over leveraging Watson IoT - it builds a more common use case (many people will already know ActiveMQ, and its embeddable). It would also be good to have an end to end sample that demonstrates using Edgent in an all Apache way, no third parties required. I believe if these start to get addressed, the project may start to see more users with new use cases. It is still a niche market. I have volunteered to mentor you. If you'll accept me, I would like to: - Be added to the roster in Whimsy https://whimsy.apache.org/roster/ppmc/edgent - Access to your JIRA - Access to your Confluence Regards, John
