Here's what I'm thinking about. First, there is the "early visibility" issue,
that can "increase" the traffic just because people are looking at "what's
available", rather than looking for something specific. Second, the straglers,
might be the "voices" that are listened to, once they discover Jini and start
talking about.
Believe me, when I say that Jini is full of excess. There are just too many
things that are too much effort to use or do, because it's still a platform, and
not actually much of a toolset. This is why I've spent so much of my time
trying to create tools, asking about unifying "platform" views to create a
"hierarchy" of interfaces and classes for "defining" as server that is "Jini
enabled".
There is just so much to do, but there is never any agreement on what to do,
because there is, of course, so many things that Jini can do, and so many ways
to do it.
There are literally 100's of thousands of lines of code in the collective Jini
community that is going to waste, because it's not been brought together,
collected and assembled into a toolset that we can at least tryout to see what
else we might need.
There is always the argument about whether Jini should be made to run inside of
a JavaEE container. There is the counter position that Jini can run a servlet
container as a service so why even get into JavaEE.
There are lots of standards around related transactional processing that Jini
can't do natively. There are always the "It's Just RPC and Corba proved that
was too painful" comments/arguments running around.
Practically, we just don't have anything easily demonstrable to hand out and
show that Jini can be a part of a large number of different modes of system
build out, and it is an asset, not a liability to use it.
So, I'm looking for ways to get to people "earlier" in their exposure to
"computer science". All the old farts and all the "Rest" crowd just spew stuff
out that we don't have demonstrable arguments against.
We need new, powerful experiences for a large number of "fresh minded" people...
Gregg
On 1/27/2012 10:28 AM, Luis Matta wrote:
Furthermore a true distributed architecture, well
thought/designed/implemented and freely available to students is unheard by
me.
(I could say here: fault tolerant, transactional, performant, protocol
agnostic, but that is way we care about Jini anyway)
I believe Jini has to focus on its strengths, because it maybe that on
distributed systems one should only exchange data
(so the structures that Jini create are an excess), it maybe that the java
type system is to rigid for distributed systems,
yada yada yada. There is no other Jini, and it rocks.
The interest is there!
On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Dan Creswell<[email protected]>wrote:
On 27 January 2012 15:53, Gregg Wonderly<[email protected]> wrote:
On Jan 26, 2012, at 3:28 AM, Dan Creswell wrote:
On 25 January 2012 23:52, Luis Matta<[email protected]> wrote:
Wonderful idea, but I do not believe very much in its success (so
ignore
me).
I'm with you on that.
Is that a "Not a wonderful idea", "with you", or a "do not believe",
"with you", or both?
Both.
Because I don't believe we have an accessibility problem to worry
about rather we have an appreciation problem. For example, if a book
on Python and a book on Jini are both available on iPad and we present
an average student with the chance to buy either and they're both at
the same price which one will they pick?
I reckon they'll pick the Python one - more likely to have heard about
it, it's a programming language and that's a subject all geeks readily
relate to. i.e. A book on Python fits the expectations and habits of
most. A book on Jini though doesn't fit expectations and habits.
You may scoop up a few stragglers but there's a more general
educational thing that needs taking care of first. Create demand, then
you can sell something (unless the demand already exists).
I'm just wondering where some of the "we teach web programming"
"schools" are going to go with their programs, considering how much effort
and interest there is on mobile devices. It seems interesting to me, that
it might be possible to "expose" people to a different path for application
development just by raising the visibility of Jini.
I'm not sure it's an awesome idea myself, but just curious what others
views are.
Gregg
