Thanks John, I’ll be following up shortly with more notes from our meeting.
— Dale > On May 17, 2017, at 10:49 PM, John D. Ament <johndam...@apache.org> wrote: > > Hi All, > > Wanted to summarize some of what Dale, Will and I chatted about this > evening with regard to Edgent and some ideas on how to move Edgent forward. > > I'll be honest, when I read the conflicting info from Kathey and in person > description from Justin I thought there was something awry, so I did want > to dig in further to having a full in depth dump of ideas. It seems to me > that the disconnect is around past contributors vs active contributors. > From what was described the only active contributor is Dale, whereas others > have contributed to the project in different ways (Will seems to be doing > some evangelism, Kathey's helped with documentation to name it a bit). In > the past there was a bit more outside delivery but at the end of day its > not even a single company but a single contributor doing most of the work. > While its clear to me that the project gets The Apache Way, until there's a > bigger developer community I would be hesitant to say the podling is > completely ready to go. > > Looking across Edgent, there's some clear areas of improvement for the > podling. I'll list them below in no particular order, and ignoring that > I've already spoken in person about some of these (just to make it clear > that it's also happening on list): > > - Downloads are an issue. First problem is that the links from > http://edgent.apache.org/docs/downloads are pointing to directories on > dist.a.o instead of the direct downloads makes it harder for a user to > leverage Edgent. Even then, the fact that the project is not distributed > in a repository manager (e.g. Maven) makes leveraging it even harder. > > - There's some website branding issues, but not issues in the "this is > wrong" sense but more "this is weird" sense. For instance, there's two > different themes from what I can tell, comparing > http://edgent.apache.org/docs/downloads and the main > http://edgent.apache.org/ the fact that there's two different color schemes > makes it feel like two different sites. The same color scheme, logos etc > should be in use. > > - Figure out a way to build synergy with existing ASF projects over demoing > with commercial entities. I threw out the idea to use Apache ActiveMQ > Artemis for MQTT based communication over leveraging Watson IoT - it builds > a more common use case (many people will already know ActiveMQ, and its > embeddable). It would also be good to have an end to end sample that > demonstrates using Edgent in an all Apache way, no third parties required. > > I believe if these start to get addressed, the project may start to see > more users with new use cases. It is still a niche market. I have > volunteered to mentor you. If you'll accept me, I would like to: > > - Be added to the roster in Whimsy > https://whimsy.apache.org/roster/ppmc/edgent > - Access to your JIRA > - Access to your Confluence > > Regards, > > John