Hi to everyone!

I'm using Hivemind for quite a while now (even for a little project on my job), 
but I think that I must abandon this, too.
I really understand if the original contributors don't have the time anymore (I 
must admit that I tried for two times now to help the Hivemind-Project with 
some documentation and could not manage to spend time on it myself) but at 
least you should try to keep the project alive ... Last board report there were 
some answers to the report, too, and the people were told to have a look at the 
jira issues, but I really feel that this is not enough to create a bigger 
interest in contributing to the project.
As I said before - I have no experience in managing an open source project or 
something, so I could not tell what should be done, but Hivemind is cool and 
should not die that silently .....

James - do you think that there is any chance that there will be any work on 
Hivemind in the future? Or is it really at its end?

Regards,
Jochen Zimmermann 



-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Jean-Francois Poilpret [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Gesendet: Dienstag, 13. Mai 2008 13:38
An: [email protected]
Betreff: RE: HiveMind for Applications

Hello Raffael,

I saw you mentioned HiveMind extensibility issues in order to have HiveMind
for Swing; for your information, I have developed several HiveMind
extensions (but no patch to HiveMind itself), one including HiveGUI, which
aims to use HiveMind in a Swing client.

Everything is available at http://hivetranse.sourceforge.net

However, I have to mention that I don't see much activity around HiveMind
(just look at the number of recent messages in this mailing list) and I tend
to believe that originators and maintainers don't find much interest into it
any longer, that's quite a pity, but that's seems reality!
Personally, I believe I will soon abandon any evolutions to my HiveMind
Utilities (what's the point?) and will just support it (and fix bugs) if I
receive any request.

Cheers

Jean-Francois

-----Original Message-----
From: Raffael Herzog [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:17 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: HiveMind for Applications

Hi there,

I just wanted to inform everyone, that there's at least *some* activity 
related to HiveMind. :)

I'm working on and with a extension to HiveMind, which is targeted at 
building module based applications. There's a Wiki online at
  http://hiveapp.raffael.ch/
Sorry, it's very incomplete, but at least it's *something* ... ;) Generally,

the project is open source and licensed under the Apache license, however, 
it currently is a one-man-show, I'm the only contributor.


To help you understand better what the idea behind HiveApp is, let me tell 
you a bit about its history/origins:

I was prototyping a build system based on a the idea of using the drools 
rule engine to take the build decisions. This build system should, of 
course be plugin-based, my idea was basically: Without plugins, it doesn't 
do anything at all. I decided to use HiveMind as my container.

There were, however, some things about HiveMind, I had to change/extend. 
First of all, I wanted drop-in plugability: A plugin should add its 
functionality just by its presence. Also, it needed to be able to contain 
its own classpath. Further, there were resources (DRL rule files in this 
case), that, ideally, could be detected and added to the rule base auto- 
matically. Finally, it should be runnable from within the IDE without 
having to run any Ant or Maven tasks, to ease development.

That's the point, where the VFS was born: Each module is a little VFS:

  /hivemodule.xml: We all know, what this is :)
  /lib/*: All the classpath, a bunch of JAR files (called top-level-
          container, they are not always actual JAR files)
  /whatever: Put more other stuff here

When running in production, this will be the actual directory structure. 
When running from within the IDE, those resources are located ... well ... 
wherever they are. They're mounted by an entry in a mount file, eg:

  EXTEND: target/classpath-mount.properties
  /hivemodule.xml: descriptor/hivemodule.xml
  /rules: resources/rules

The left side is the target path in the VFS, the right side is the physical 
path relaitve to the mount file or an absolute URI. The 'EXTEND' entry is 
sort of an include: The file target/classpath-mount.porperties is created 
by a Maven plugin and contains the runtime dependencies from the M2 POMs. 
Using this is optional, of course. The method to build the module's VFS is 
is a pluggable module layout.


A second important point was classloader management. Because, if this build 
system would ever be usable, I wanted to avoid version conflicts of 
different versions of different plugins (which may also be 3rd party 
plugins, of course), I wanted to add a intelligent classloader management. 
See http://hiveapp.raffael.ch/wiki/doku.php/classloader for details.


Other things you can find in HiveApp are mainly some additional services 
(e.g. the pattern for sharing service implementations as introduced at 
http://imsardine.blogspot.com/2008/03/hivemind-how-to-share-same.html is 
part of the HiveApp core since almost the beginning).


Unfortunately, I had to do some workarounds and hacks, to achieve my goals. 
In one instance, the AppBuilderFactory, I even had to copy and modify 
HiveMind's code. I'd be happy to start contributing to HiveMind to make it 
more open, so it's easier to add functionality to HiveMind, i.e. make 
HiveMind itself more pluggable. This may be useful for other things, too, 
like e.g. some HiveMind for Swing or HiveMind for EJBs project. I'd 
definitely would want to keep such extensions out of HiveMind's core.

Of course, we'd have to discuss *what* we're actually going to do. But 
allowing to extend HiveMind a bit more might revive the project a bit by 
making it more open to other applications than just Webapps (I know, 
HiveMind basically already is open to other applications, but you can 
always "feel" that the developers mainly had Webapps in mind).


Comments and suggestions are of course welcome ... (I probably wouldn't have

written this mail if they weren't ;)


Cheers,
   Raffi

-- 
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is
no difference, but in practice, there is.

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