I started working on making new demos and “getting started” stuff back before the holidays. Here’s my thinking…
As Patricia alludes to, it really shouldn’t be necessary to build the River distribution in order to try out some samples and get started. After all, the artifacts are published on Maven Central, so they can simply be referenced in a Maven build (or Gradle, Ivy, Etc). Towards that end, I started building a new Mavenized ‘examples’ project, which can be checked-out from https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/river/river-examples/river-examples/trunk. In that project, there are currently modules for the service browser jars and a ‘home’ folder for the compiled and packaged examples. (might be best to download it and do a ‘mvn install site’). There’s also documentation for the examples under the main project (look at <project-home>/target/site/index.html - this should be familiar to Maven users). The documentation currently includes how to build and run the service browser (although I think right now it’s incomplete on how the configuration works - haven’t looked at it since Dec 15). Right now, the project has a dependency on the new ‘river-rt-tools’ modules that I talked about back in December as well. So in order to run the examples, you currently need to checkout 'https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/river/river-rt-tools/trunk' and do a ‘mvn install’ on it, which will install the runtime tool artifacts (start.jar) in your local Maven cache. In the end, those artifacts would also be released and published on Maven Central, so you eventually wouldn’t need to build the runtime tools separately. My plan is to add modules to the river-examples project for a 'hello-service’ and ‘hello-client’, as well as a config for the infrastructure services (Reggie, etc). So eventually, the “getting started” instructions become “have a look at ‘river-examples’”, and we’d remove the (very confusing, if you ask me) ‘examples’ folder from the JTSK distribution. As a bonus, we can isolate new users from the convoluted build system in River. If this seems like a reasonable path forward for our “getting started” experience, perhaps you’d like to work on bringing over some of the examples from the JTSK to the ‘river-examples’ project. That’s probably also a good way to re-familiarize yourself with Jini. I probably won’t have any cycles to work on it seriously for the next couple weeks, but could cheerfully make suggestions. You should be able to check-out these two Maven project in the IDE of your choice. I was using NetBeans, but AFAIK, Eclipse should be able to use the Maven build directly. I just haven’t tried it. Cheers, Greg Trasuk. On Jan 5, 2015, at 6:07 PM, Patricia Shanahan <[email protected]> wrote: > I have completed buying a new home, moving into it, and selling the old one, > followed by Christmas in England and recovery from the cold I caught there. > That means I'm ready to get much more active in River. > > Last year, we got some feedback suggesting that better support for new users > might remove a barrier to community building. My main agenda is community > building, so I want to work on that. I am going to be a very naive potential > user, so stand by for basic questions. > > I began by downloading the binary version, since in this mode I am not > interested in being a River developer. However, when I looked at the "Getting > Started" page, river.apache.org/user-guide-basic-river-services.html, it says: > > "The instructions assume that you're building from source as checked out from > the SVN trunk. Currently this is necessary because the code snippets below > use methods and classes which, at time of writing, haven't made it into the > latest binary release yet. Having said that, the code you will need in the > binary release isn't to far removed from what you'll see below, so you can > progress with the binary release if you want to and are happy odifying the > code." > > According to the page info, the "time of writing" was no later than November > 23, 2013. Do I still need to do a River build before I can run the example? > If so, why and what can I do to fix that? > > I have no idea whether or not I would be happy "odifying" code - maybe > "modifying"? > > What is the best procedure for editing the "Getting Started" page? I want to > make sure that any changes I make really are improvements, so I would like > PMC review as I go along. > > Patricia > >
