Hi Peter,
I think you're absolutely right. Here are my comments on your points;
1. Importing River into your preferred IDE, including the tools.jar
into
your classpath on the correct tested jdk environment and building it.
I hope this experience will be improved when we (I) finish RIVER-301.
The tools.jar thing I believe is RIVER-272. I seem to recall someone
saying that they're looked at that and were reluctant to post their
patch or that they were intending to look at it. (I might have dreamed
that conversation though, can anyone else remember it?)
2. Getting to know Rivers structure, how it all works, playing around
with
it, writing some programs that use it to improve understanding.
Unfortunately, I can't see a way around this without spending the
personal effort to actually do the reading and coding required to get
familiar. My advice, would be to pick one small area and get to know
that and then branch out into other areas as and when.
3. Getting to know how the integration tests work to improve
confidence
your not breaking anything.
This is RIVER-301 again. I've got an ant script that can now run the
tests I just need to tidy it up and attach it to JIRA. It's not
perfect, but since I don't understand how the integration tests work
either, I'm having trouble making it so.
Does anyone know where I can find a complete list of all the test
categories? I don't seem to be able to find it and need it to complete
the script.
I think that the unit tests should be written for new code (someone's
writing new code?) but I doubt that there'll be much take up on writing
unit tests for existing code.
4. Becoming confident enough to tackle some of the open issues.
My advice is to just jump in. Pick an issue (any issue) and try to work
through it. Attach the patch to JIRA and it'll eventually get looked
at. I did this with RIVER-296 when I was in no way confident that I
understood the code I was looking at.
There are integration tests and dedicated committers who'll check
through these things and get back to you if it's not correct. No one is
going to be attacked (I hope, for my sake!) for attaching a patch that
unintentionally breaks the build or isn't a complete fix.
I hope that some of these comments (and the eventual completion of
RIVER-301) will lower the entry barrier. I'd like to reiterate my final
comment that you shouldn't be reluctant to get involved because you're
not "confident enough". Nothing improves confidence like trying to
solve a puzzle and eventually getting through it. That in and of itself
gets you part the way up the learning curve.
Cheers,
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Firmstone [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 13 March 2009 02:34
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Board Report is due...
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
www.sucden.co.uk
Sucden (UK) Limited, 5 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9SG
Telephone +44 20 7940 9400
Registered in England no. 1095841
VAT registration no. GB 446 9061 33
Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and entered
in the FSA register under no. 114239
This email, including any files transmitted with it, is confidential and may be
privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. If
you are not the intended recipient of this message, please notify
[email protected] immediately and delete it from your computer system.
We believe, but do not warrant, that this email and its attachments are virus-free, but you should check.
Sucden (UK) Ltd may monitor traffic data of both business and personal emails.
By replying to this email, you consent to Sucden’s monitoring the content of
any emails you send to or receive from Sucden. Sucden is not liable for any
opinions expressed by the sender where this is a non-business email.
The contents of this e-mail do not constitute advice and should not be regarded
as a recommendation to buy, sell or otherwise deal with any particular
investment.
This message has been scanned for viruses by Mimecast.
