Greg, I'd like to thank you for and acknowledge your efforts as PMC and especially for managing onging 2.2 releases to keep this project alive.
I'd also like to nominate Dennis Reedy as PMC candidate if he's willing to accept? The message to new developers is, we are listening and welcome your participation, as Greg metioned, we're working on the build process. I think we, the River community are dealing with some fundamental issues (feel free to contribute): 1. Complexity effects; brittle code, fear of change, difficulty understanding issues and barriers to entry. 2. A process for resolving conflict (caused by no 1), working out how to present issues properly and having those issues heard, then proposing solutions and voting on them. 3. How to encourage participation for new arrivals and prevent items 1 and 2 from discouraging participation. Complexities: 1. Serialization compatibility and versioning 2. ClassLoaders and downloaded code. 3. Interpreting the Java memory model. 4. Build processes and dependency resolution Perhaps ironically, some of the most difficult complex problems have been solved and River provides these: 1. Partial failure; Leasing 2. Managing distributed state; Transactions and Events 3. Loosely coupled Tuple Space; A good memory only implementation in Outrigger, admittedly Dan's Blitz, does a much better job with persistance, but River still provides the platform to enable that. We have acceptable solutions for discovery and lookup, although we still need to address the internet and improve security. To tackle Serialization complexity, I've proposed Distributed, which is compatible with Serialization and provides an upgrade path for serializable objects. Distributed, unlike Serializable, doesn't publish internal class structure and compatibility is driven only by method signatures, so you can maintain compatibility and change implementations and even classes. Distributed objects cannot implement Entry, but they can be used as entry fields. Distributed solves some state migration issues encountered in Javaspaces. Regards, Peter. ----- Original message ----- > Hi folks: > > River is required to report to Apache’s board in May. The due date for > reporting will be around May 14, for the board meeting May 21. Here’s a > proposed report - let me know if you want any changes. > > At the same time, I’d like to step away as PMC chair. Ideally we should > choose a new chair before May 14, so I can propose the required board > resolution before the May 21 meeting. > > Cheers, > > Greg Trasuk. > > Apache River is a Java-based Service Oriented Architecture, implementing > the Jini Specification and Jini Technology Starter Kit originally > donated by Sun Microsystems. > > ISSUES FOR THE BOARD > > There are no board-level issues at this time > > RELEASES > > Apache River 2.2.2 was released on November 18, 2013 > Apache River 2.2.1 was released on May 2, 2013. > > COMMUNITY > > No new committers have been added since Nov of 2011. > There has been some discussion of the project’s health on the dev@ and > users@ mailing lists, which has led to an effort to update the project’s > build architecture, in hopes of removing at least one barrier to > participation. > > ACTIVITY > > Mailing lists and development have been reasonably active in the past few > months. 4 messages on users@ from Mar-Apr, and over 150 messages on > dev@. > > Six issues have been reported on Jira and four of those have been > resolved.
