I've been having a chat about what various things in the "Extras (was PGP)" thread and something has come up that I think requires a new thread.
What *is* River? Some of the work in "Extras" that I want to do is make is easy for developers to get started writing and using River services. Paraphrasing some of the comments on tha; "there's plenty of containers and third party applications around, users should just be pointed towards them. We should be concentrating on making it easy for users to swap between these containers, rather than reproducing anything that they do". Please correct me if that paraphrasing is unfair/wrong. So my question is this; do people see River as existing solely to provide functionality to the third party containers, thereby meaning that developers should only ever be downloading River as a dependency for their chosen container/application; or do we see developers downloading and using River directly? My personal view is *both*. In my experience, I've worked on a project that was implemented without any third party container, directly using the River (or rather Jini 2.1) code-base. I admit that we ended up writing a container-like service in the end. We certainly never downloaded or used any of the existing containers, in fact I'd never heard of them until I started getting involved in River. My work on that project would have been much more simple if the River/Jini download had come with a few more examples and utilities - or if more noise existed on the River site about all the third-party applications available! Reading the comments written by others who use/own/write service containers, it seems like a lot of work could be done in River to make their jobs easier. There's certainly a lot of information and ideas that can flow both ways. So is there room for both approaches? I certainly have the will to try and work on both, I'm reluctant to reduce the "make using River directly easier" component to being fulfilled by just supplying a list of external links to other software products - although such a list would be a desirable addition. Cheers, Tom
