I think I've been heading slowly in that general direction; I'm still
fixing bugs. Because there are ongoing concerns regarding the number of
internal changes to modernise the code (public api compatible), there's
no plan to make this a public release, but instead allow the community
to decide what to do with the code, there is significant support to make
these improvements, it's just the migration process is a source of
contention. I do plan to produce release candidates for wider testing
in the near future however.
What I've worked on:
1. Distributed objects, to replace Serializable, instead of using
reflection to serialize an objects serial form, it serializes
instructions to recreate objects remotely using method calls and
arguments. So now you can extend objects that aren't Serializable
without a zero arg constructor and implement Distributed, and you
can check invariants, copy arrays and Collections AND have final
fields.
2. Fixing Bugs, lots of bugs
3. Eliminating unnecessary DNS calls.
4. Making security scalable.
5. We need access to decent hardware to perform real world testing.
What I'd like to do:
1. UDT Sockets
2. DNS-SRV Lookup Discovery
3. Distributed Lambda Expressions
4. Modular build
Good to hear River is still useful.
Regards,
Peter.
On 13/05/2014 12:54 AM, Bryan Thompson wrote:
We have been using river/jini since 2006. While I have very little time for
work on open source projects outside of our own (read - completely swamped), I
am hugely in favor of its continued life. The main points for me are not so
much the evolution of the software as continuing to harden an already great
platform such that it can continue to be used.
Thanks,
Bryan
On May 12, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Greg Trasuk<tras...@stratuscom.com> wrote:
On May 11, 2014, at 12:30 AM, Peter<j...@zeus.net.au> wrote:
Ultimately, if community involvement continues to decline, we may have to send
River to the attic.
Distributed computing is difficult and we often bump into the shortcomings of
the java platform, I think these difficulties are why developers have trouble
agreeing on solutions.
But I think more importantly we need increased user involvement.
Is there any advise or resources we can draw on from other Apache projects?
It may be, ultimately, that the community has failed and River is headed to the
Attic. The usual question is “Can the project round up the 3 ‘+1’ votes
required to make an Apache release?” Historically, we have been able to do
that, at least for maintenance releases, and I don’t see that changing, at
least for a while.
The problem is future development and the ongoing health of the project. On
this point, we don’t seem to have consensus on where we want the project to go,
and there’s limited enthusiasm for user-focused requirements. Also, my calls
to discuss the health of the project have had no response (well, there was a
tangent about the build system, but personally I think that misses the point).
I will include in the board report the fact that no-one has expressed an
interest in taking over as PMC chair, and ask if there are any other expert
resources that can help.
Cheers,
Greg Trasuk.
