For me, the next step in this flow is to learn Maven.
In general, is it reasonable to assume that, if I had been working
actively as a programmer for the last few years, I would have already
learned Maven?
If not, we need to document, at least by reference, the steps involved
to get far enough along with Maven to try out River.
Patricia
On 1/5/2015 7:16 PM, Greg Trasuk wrote:
I started working on making new demos and “getting started” stuff
back before the holidays. Here’s my thinking…
As Patricia alludes to, it really shouldn’t be necessary to build the
River distribution in order to try out some samples and get started.
After all, the artifacts are published on Maven Central, so they can
simply be referenced in a Maven build (or Gradle, Ivy, Etc).
Towards that end, I started building a new Mavenized ‘examples’
project, which can be checked-out from
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/river/river-examples/river-examples/trunk.
In that project, there are currently modules for the service browser
jars and a ‘home’ folder for the compiled and packaged examples.
(might be best to download it and do a ‘mvn install site’). There’s
also documentation for the examples under the main project (look at
<project-home>/target/site/index.html - this should be familiar to
Maven users). The documentation currently includes how to build and
run the service browser (although I think right now it’s incomplete
on how the configuration works - haven’t looked at it since Dec 15).
Right now, the project has a dependency on the new ‘river-rt-tools’
modules that I talked about back in December as well. So in order to
run the examples, you currently need to checkout
'https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/river/river-rt-tools/trunk' and do
a ‘mvn install’ on it, which will install the runtime tool artifacts
(start.jar) in your local Maven cache. In the end, those artifacts
would also be released and published on Maven Central, so you
eventually wouldn’t need to build the runtime tools separately.
My plan is to add modules to the river-examples project for a
'hello-service’ and ‘hello-client’, as well as a config for the
infrastructure services (Reggie, etc). So eventually, the “getting
started” instructions become “have a look at ‘river-examples’”, and
we’d remove the (very confusing, if you ask me) ‘examples’ folder
from the JTSK distribution. As a bonus, we can isolate new users
from the convoluted build system in River.
If this seems like a reasonable path forward for our “getting
started” experience, perhaps you’d like to work on bringing over some
of the examples from the JTSK to the ‘river-examples’ project. That’s
probably also a good way to re-familiarize yourself with Jini. I
probably won’t have any cycles to work on it seriously for the next
couple weeks, but could cheerfully make suggestions.
You should be able to check-out these two Maven project in the IDE of
your choice. I was using NetBeans, but AFAIK, Eclipse should be able
to use the Maven build directly. I just haven’t tried it.
Cheers,
Greg Trasuk.
On Jan 5, 2015, at 6:07 PM, Patricia Shanahan <p...@acm.org> wrote:
I have completed buying a new home, moving into it, and selling the
old one, followed by Christmas in England and recovery from the
cold I caught there. That means I'm ready to get much more active
in River.
Last year, we got some feedback suggesting that better support for
new users might remove a barrier to community building. My main
agenda is community building, so I want to work on that. I am going
to be a very naive potential user, so stand by for basic
questions.
I began by downloading the binary version, since in this mode I am
not interested in being a River developer. However, when I looked
at the "Getting Started" page,
river.apache.org/user-guide-basic-river-services.html, it says:
"The instructions assume that you're building from source as
checked out from the SVN trunk. Currently this is necessary because
the code snippets below use methods and classes which, at time of
writing, haven't made it into the latest binary release yet. Having
said that, the code you will need in the binary release isn't to
far removed from what you'll see below, so you can progress with
the binary release if you want to and are happy odifying the
code."
According to the page info, the "time of writing" was no later than
November 23, 2013. Do I still need to do a River build before I can
run the example? If so, why and what can I do to fix that?
I have no idea whether or not I would be happy "odifying" code -
maybe "modifying"?
What is the best procedure for editing the "Getting Started" page?
I want to make sure that any changes I make really are
improvements, so I would like PMC review as I go along.
Patricia
