First off let me say I am a huge fan of Apache River, and its predecessor Jini. I even have a Jini leather jacket. :-) I think this technology has a lot of potential to do some amazing things especially in my area of interest, distributed computing. I think the people who are working as developers on this project have done an amazing job.
That being said great technology all the time does not mean that it will be used or even noticed. I think River is lacking in certain areas that has nothing to do with the programming, or the ideas behind it. The following list of things is not meant to assign blame to anyone, or anything. These are just things that I think need to be addressed in my very humble opinion. 1. *Accessibility* River is an incredible concept, but the conceptual ideas can be daunting to people starting out with it. I think explaining the concepts by using real world examples, this could attract more people and make River more approachable. As an example I found the explanation behind the MapReduce incredibly easy and I was able to get a system setup, tested, and run in a few hours. It provided some great examples, as well as explained why they worked. Furthermore it explained some real world cases for using it, such as log querying. Increasing the ease of people approaching Jini will probably increase the number of people/companies who want to be involved in it. I would love to start playing around with River but I don't know how to start. The "Getting Started" page says that I need to check out the code from SVN trunk, and build it myself. Has this changed? 2. *River Site* The site itself doesn't provide much information about the project except that it has been released. When I explore a little deeper I noticed some broken links to sites including the links to original Jini documentation, and the link to Jan Newmarch Jini tutorial is broken. This directly impacts the first impression that people get when they are looking into River. Is anyone in charge of the site? 3. *Roadmap* What is the future of River? What is the overall goal of each point release. What about goals for major releases? I think if we come to a general consensus on what are goals are we can move forward together as a group of programmers since we all know where we are heading. 4. *Mission* One of the overall thoughts I have had while reading the correspondence in the group is that I don't know what the mission is? I know the group is to continue the development and advancement of Jini technology but that is a very broad and generic statement. Does this group want to help people implement the technology, only work on the specifications, what level in the tech stack does River start and stop, or is some combination of all of these? Are any of these things the group as a whole interested in implementing? What are your feeling on this? As a side question: Could something like the Hadoop YARN be implemented using River? -- Jeremy R. Easton-Marks "être fort pour être utile"
