Hi,
I'd like to contribute, I'm thinking about nio, SocketChannel and
SSLSocketChannel, however I'm still new to Jini, so there's a relatively
steep learning curve to overcome before I'll feel confident enough to do so.
The obstacles that a new developer faces:
1. Importing River into your preferred IDE, including the tools.jar into
your classpath on the correct tested jdk environment and building it.
2. Getting to know Rivers structure, how it all works, playing around
with it, writing some programs that use it to improve understanding.
3. Getting to know how the integration tests work to improve confidence
your not breaking anything. It'd be nice if there were some junit tests
for the newer developer to improve confidence and to perform some checks
before committing, unit tests could be added gradually by module and
reduce the burden on the integration test developers. I'm bogged down
here, I'm in the habit of using junit to assist in understanding code
intricacies.
4. Becoming confident enough to tackle some of the open issues.
There's heaps of documentation available regarding jini, what it is and
supposed to do, however there's a significant learning curve before one
can start using it.
On another front, I'm interested in using it for JavaME CDC embedded
devices, where I guess River has huge potential as these devices become
more powerful and plentiful.
I certainly want to see River succeed, it'd be a terrible shame to see
it terminated, I think we just need to work on lowering the barriers to
entry for new developers as an urgent priority.
Perhaps a page on the website to guide new developers?
Cheers,
Peter Firmstone.
Jukka Zitting wrote:
Hi,
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Niclas Hedhman <[email protected]> wrote:
River PMC,
please note that the quarterly Board report is due in a few days;
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
We're already a bit late, so I just went ahead and filed the following report.
<report>
River is aimed at the development and advancement of the Jini
technology core infrastructure. Jini technology is a service oriented
architecture that defines a programming model which both exploits and
extends Java technology to enable the construction of secure,
distributed systems which are adaptive to change. River has been
incubating since December 2006.
The River project is not doing well. Practically all original
committers are inactive and while there are interested users and even
some pretty active discussions about the future of River, that
interest isn't showing up as patches or other more constructive
contributions.
We've seen some effort towards making the QA test suite more
accessible, and there is interest in doing another release. However,
nobody is actively working on new features or bigger improvements. It
has been suggested that River needs a major new vision, but its
debatable whether that would do better as a fresh new project. In any
case nobody is actively pushing for anything like that.
There is still hope for River, but at this rate the project is heading
for termination.
Issues before graduation:
* Re-activate the development community
* Migrate packages to org.apache.river
* Another Apache release
</report>
BR,
Jukka Zitting
