Immediately after a release is usually the time that I'm thinking about lessons learned, the project road map, and future deliveries from Harmony.
Most noticeable for me was the long stabilization period we undertook for M9 compared to earlier releases. This was required, I believe, because of the longer open development period [1]. The lesson to take away from that is to ensure we keep an eye on our regular release schedule and keep the time boxes short enough that stable fixes get out to our users, and we minimize the frozen codebase period. Looking ahead I'd therefore expect 5.0 M10 to be released at the end of May (6 weeks after April 8th = May 20). The other thing that bothers me is the lack of expose we give our Java 6 branch. While the majority of fixes we commit are applied to both branches, we have some good work completed in the Java 6 API branch's core classes that is not getting the uptake it deserves. The non-core Java 6 classes get very little attention at the moment. With Harmony's strong modular architecture we can easily construct a headless runtime that delivers those core classes without the missing functionality. I'd like to suggest that we experiment with the flexible components in Harmony to deliver a headless runtime based on the Java 6 APIs. Thoughts? [1] Depending on exactly how you count it, we were open from 17 Nov - 27 Feb, which is a massive 14.5 weeks! Regards, Tim
