I’ll offer my observation from overheard discussions over the years, from a few, but varied Jini community members. But first, let me state that I am a pro Rio person (and Dennis I must apologize again for leaving it off of my slide at the Jini Community meeting in Europe).
I’ve never used Rio in a deployment, but I’ve looked into it for a couple of different projects. My primary issue in my River deployments has always been delayed codebase downloads and proxy unmarshalling were needed because of network bandwidth restrictions, computer resource limitations and user interface speed to get my ServiceUI desktop to “display” all the icons. The large number of services that I deployed onto multiple machines, verses the few that anyone person would use. Would require deserialization of hundreds of proxies that would never be used. Windows restrictions on a handful of active sockets, max, would cause endpoints to “fail” to connect. There were all kinds of issues and I needed delayed unmarshalling to solve those issues. So, the solutions that I rolled into Jini 2.0/2.1 to solve these problems for me, provided some isolation from other things available in the community. Ultimately, I’ve been trying to push for a “container” specification for some time. My simple “startnow” project on java.net is where I’ve put most of the things that I’ve done to put things on top of Jini. The simple interface that Seven provides, is something that I think is a good start. My observation is that the community has stated in various conversations, that Rio was just an awfully large and complicated bit of code to “start” with. It is very powerful and very much an end to end solution to a lot of things, and that is what I understand people in the community to not want to “include” in their simple Jini services. Some of that probably comes from JavaEE experience or “knowledge” which makes them feel that Rio might just take them down the path of not being in control of much of anything and having to always have “the same” container for all their services when that might not be required. I am all about fixing things that need to be fixed, and standardizing things that as standards, don’t limit choices on evolving to better standards. That’s what we need to focus on. Because of the flexibility of River with so many endpoint implementations, flexible implementation details, etc., it is really an unfinished platform. There needs to be fewer “free” choices, and a lot more “refinement” of interfaces so that very specific issues are fixed for specific releases, but we can still evolve to create better and better experiences. These things have all been said before by members of this community. There are lots of experienced people here, and lots of people who have found “easier” ways to do things, because of the unfinished nature of the beast. We know, really need to start working on finishing things with solid limitations on choices where more choices just don’t make anything easier or more possible. Gregg On Feb 18, 2014, at 11:50 AM, Dennis Reedy <dennis.re...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Feb 18, 2014, at 1236PM, Greg Trasuk <tras...@stratuscom.com> wrote: > >> >> Hi Dennis: >> >> Discussion intertwined… >> >> Cheers, >> >> Greg. >> >> On Feb 18, 2014, at 11:45 AM, Dennis Reedy <dennis.re...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> >>> On Feb 18, 2014, at 1113AM, Greg Trasuk <tras...@stratuscom.com> wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> Hi Dennis: >>>> >>>> I’ll bite twice: >>>> >>>> - Your offer to contribute Rio may have been before my time as a >>>> committer, because I don’t recall the discussion (mind you I’m also at a >>>> loss to recall what I had for dinner last night ;-). >>> >>> November 28th, 2013. Email thread entitled "River Container (was surrogate >>> container)". You responded asking questions about code provenance. Snippet >>> from the thread: >>> >>> I see it’s Apache licensed. Ideally we’d have a CCLA in place from all the >>> corporate contributors, but I personally don’t know if that’s required if >>> the contributed code is ASL2. We might have to consult more experienced >>> Apache people. >>> >>> Greg. >>> >>> I'd like to find out what would need to be done here. If anyone could help, >>> that would be great. I have no problems donating Rio to the River project. >>> River would get a mature project, with tons of real-world application of >>> River put into it. I think it would do River good, and also Rio. >> >> >>> If not part of the project I think River should at least reference it as a >>> notable project that can really speed developer adoption of River. >>> >> >> OK, let’s assume that you’re willing to contribute Rio, and that the River >> community is in favour. I’ll start a separate thread to discuss the steps. >> >> And we should go ahead and add a reference to Rio on the River site in the >> meantime. While we’re at it, any other projects that should be referenced? >> The “notable projects” idea is a very good one. > > Great! > >> >>> >>>> How was River unwelcoming, and do you feel the same situation exists now? >>> >>>> - Could you give a little detail on why you think container projects >>>> should be outside River? Is it just development stickiness, or something >>>> else? >>> >>> It's not container projects in general. It's projects that were never >>> accepted as *the* way to do something and now want to be included as >>> defacto support into River. I see no reason that your contribution should >>> be considered over more mature implementations at this point (Rio, >>> Seven,...). I think most importantly, there is no specification for >>> "containers" to implement, no requirements. The first thing to do would be >>> to define what these are, then contributed implementations can appear, and >>> developers/deployers choose what implementation to use. >>> >> >> OK, fair point. No specifications, I agree with. FWIW, the container I >> wrote uses the Service Starter conventions, which is why it’s able to use >> Reggie unmodified. > > Right, as does Rio. Any service that can be started with River's Service > Starter starts out of the box with Rio. > >> The only thing added is the packaging into a single archive file. So, I >> hereby propose that we adopt a service archive packaging standard that looks >> like the one in the container (discussion will no doubt follow). > > You can propose this, at this point I dont know what it looks like or whether > it will be the way we move forward. > >> >> To be clear, though, I’m not suggesting that river-container should be “the” >> way, just “a” way. > > > Then it should be outside of the main River project, and referenced as a > notable project. > > >> And there was no small amount of real-world application experience that went >> into river-container. >> >>>> >>>> I’ll expand on why I think River needs a container desperately: Basically >>>> there is no way for a developer to use Jini or River as it stands. >>> >>> I agree with your statement above, just use Rio :) >> >> Can I at least get you to agree that there should be at least one container >> that’s part of the River project? Possibly more than one, that serve >> different targets? >> >> I recall that years ago, on Jini-users, John McClain commented that the Jini >> team didn’t want to sanction a single style of deploying services. While I >> suspect that logic still holds, it’s pretty clear to me that the core >> project needs to have at least “a” container. > > And it does, ServiceStarter. > > Dennis
