In general, I agree with not telling people what build tool to use.
For "Getting Started" there is a trade-off. There does not seem to be
any one tool that dominates the way "make" dominated in the 1980's. No
matter what tool or tools we pick, some potential users will not be
familiar with any of them, so detailed instructions will be needed.
If we have the resources to create, fully document, and maintain
"Getting Started" examples in two or more tools, great. If not, I think
it would be better to have one approach really well documented than two
incomplete approaches.
Patricia
On 1/8/2015 2:21 PM, Greg Trasuk wrote:
Hi Dennis:
I’m slightly allergic to hard-and-fast conventions. For example, the
service browser example really doesn’t fit those conventions. Also,
I’m reticent to suggest repackaging the infrastructure services
(reggie, outrigger, mahalo, etc) at this time (meaning that I
personally have no plans to do it). Having said that, I’m basically
with you. Matter of fact if you have a look at the River-Container
examples over at https://github.com/trasukg/river-container-examples
you’ll see that’s pretty much the same style. The minor difference
is that I’ve used ‘hello-impl’ rather than ‘hello-service’, and
there’s also a ‘hello-module’ that is the packaged artifact for the
container.
I believe the critical thing is to make sure that the client api is
separate, so that the client doesn’t accidentally know anything about
the implementation. All else is implementation details, though I
agree that we should provide a good example.
As far as Maven/Gradle, it happens that I know Maven and not Gradle.
All I am trying to do is provide some easier example than just diving
into the JTSK source. If someone were to contribute a Gradle-based
example, that’s all-the-better for user choice. But I don’t think we
should go around telling people what build tool to use.
Cheers,
Greg Trasuk
On Jan 8, 2015, at 4:05 PM, Dennis Reedy <dennis.re...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Greg,
I'd like to suggest that River follow the conventions that align
with whats recommended over in Rio
(http://www.rio-project.org/conventions.html). This has been pretty
successful using both Maven and Gradle (at this time I would go
with Gradle btw).
HTH
Regards
Dennis
On Jan 5, 2015, at 1016PM, Greg Trasuk <tras...@stratuscom.com>
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
