Hi all, I've personally been increasingly uncomfortable with the nature of the discussion on river-dev (and Jini-Users to a lesser extent), trouble is I've not been able to understand why......until now, here's my beef:
The river-dev list is full of minutae - discussion of coding standards, issues on nitty gritty bits of behaviour around locking or preferred-lists or when we might get the code drop or testing or checkins. But, I don't care about any of this stuff, why? Because it's irrelevant. It has no importance whatsoever in the big picture which comes down to: WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO WITH RIVER? And that question leads to a bunch of others for me: (1) Who's the audience for River? (2) What are we going to deliver to that audience? (3) Why would that audience care about what we're delivering? (4) What should River be about? Until we get that straight anything we do is random, potentially useless or pointless. I'm not going to try and answer those questions individually but I will put forth some thoughts: Surely we want whatever we produce to be used in real-world projects. Yes, we want to encourage pet/private projects because that fosters innovation but these are insufficient to justify River's existence. It's all about adoption, which means existing users are important but not as important as new ones, right now. If River is to get adoption, it will be because the world is (of it's own accord or because of something we did) aligned better with what we're doing. What kind of world would that be? SOA? EDA? Utility computing? All of these? Something else? We need to get in touch with the real-world (I fear I sound like Morpheus). We need to be a lean mean opinion-soliciting machine. Everybody is entitled to their opinion and some will undoubtedly be more expert than mine but I'm only so interested in those personal opinions. See, I'm much more interested in real-world opinion from existing and potential users. And I'm not interested in just blindly addressing/dealing with those opinions because they might be wrong. Equally an apparently "wrong" opinion shouldn't be ignored out of hand as it can be an indicator of a need for education or some other constructive action. So when you present an opinion, consider are you representing your own needs or those of others? Which is more beneficial long term for adoption and progress? I for one firmly believe the Starter Kit is anything but a Starter Kit. It's a big bundle of everything which is a convenient way to seed the beginnings of a project (HotJava anyone?) but terrible beyond that. There's a lot of value in the contents but the way in which we deliver it fails to release the value effectively. I think we've all spent far too much time trying to manage the shortcomings of this packaging approach, installers, reworking of documentation, wikis etc. All of these things are treating the symptoms, not the root cause which is the starter kit is a bad model for delivery. We seriously need to drop some of the perfectionist attitude. The ultimate judge of what is perfect is our user base and something that is supposedly perfect on paper can every quickly be ripped apart in practice. So rather than endlessly debating to reach the perfect solution, let's focus a little more on getting stuff out there for people to try. We can do that via nightly builds, prototype API releases etc separate from whatever our official tested builds are. Okay I've said enough, I'll finish with a plea: Let's stop focusing on nitty gritty detail detached from the outside world so's we can figure out where in the world we are and where we want to go. One way to do that might be to go back and re-examine the list of things Jim Hurley posted a few days ago....... Dan.
