I do agree too, though I was holding out hope that we wouldn't need a product like LIFX but instead would geta wealth of choices from manufacturers. So you pick up a new TV, a coffee machine or router, you get OCF support so you can use IoTivity to interact with. I hear they're coming...
As for lack of binaries, that's partly my fault. It was a proposal in the beginning that we produce our own binaries, but I spoke against it. I said source would suffice. That's partly because none of the binaries projects release work for me (Ubuntu builds, no thanks). But Morten has a point in terms of making OCF available through the way developers are used to getting their code, be it npm (which we have), gem, Maven, nuget, or CPAN. That's why we made the IoTivity-node and IoTivity-Java bindings, but we stopped short of publishing it to the tools people expect to get. And yes, our examples suck. They're trying to be hybrids of examples and unit tests, so they get to be good at neither... ________________________________ From: iotivity-dev@lists.iotivity.org [iotivity-dev@lists.iotivity.org] on behalf of Dave Thaler via Lists.Iotivity.Org [dthaler=microsoft....@lists.iotivity.org] Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2018 20:30 To: Morten Nielsen Cc: iotivity-dev@lists.iotivity.org Subject: Re: [dev] Where are the devs? I very much agree with Morten’s points in this thread, especially the original list of gaps compare to where AllJoyn was at. I think the top one is #1 (A broadly available product like LIFX for developers to play with) and I’m guessing it’s unlikely the rest will improve much until that one is solved by having a relatively cheap product that many apps actually want to integrate with. The LIFX bulb was a great example of such a product for AllJoyn. I don’t have time to spend on improving it myself (largely due to the lack of #1), but just wanted to weigh in that it’s not just Morten. Thanks Morten for being persistent and providing a voice of a larger community of developers. I hope this list, and iotivity and OCF in general, will be open and accommodating to all types of developers so that the community can grow and Iotivity can be more attractive. I hope we can keep the discussion constructive rather than trying to alienate devs. Dave From: iotivity-dev@lists.iotivity.org <iotivity-dev@lists.iotivity.org> On Behalf Of Morten Nielsen Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2018 10:58 AM To: Gregg Reynolds <d...@mobileink.com> Cc: iotivity-dev <iotivity-dev@lists.iotivity.org> Subject: Re: [dev] Where are the devs? OK on second thought I do have more to say, because this has been bothering me all night, and I just need to be blunt below, because I’m honestly a little bit shocked and sad by sentiments Gregg puts earlier is nothing short of scary. Let’s start with the obvious one: Ø A dev who freaks when confronted with a command line is a amateur. I mean… really? Ø Frankly, I don't care about those people. And anyway who said anything about learning another build system? You don't need to know anything about Bazel to execute "$ bazel build myapp". Any more than you need to know how make works to do "$ make". First, when you don’t care about people who aren’t “good enough” because they don’t do it your way, you’re really showing your arrogance towards anyone who doesn’t do it your way. Second, asking people to change how they build their software is, how should I put it… insane? Sure it might be easy, but you don’t win anyone over by asking people to completely change their processes, or tell them you don’t care about them. Sorry but this is NOT how you build a community! Also I can tell from your blog<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.mobileink.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cdthaler%40microsoft.com%7C01c2a1ad777f40e42b6708d5cb59464e%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C636638506652079180&sdata=O2XqZ0o%2BnMg0Is9MZngt%2FzGGiDK7nMN08YLJSaiLa2Q%3D&reserved=0> you’re personally invested in promoting Bazel, and you’re on a personal vendetta against build systems, Maven, Gradle etc<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.mobileink.com%2F2016%2F07%2Fwhy-i-still-hate-hate-hate-build-systems.html&data=02%7C01%7Cdthaler%40microsoft.com%7C01c2a1ad777f40e42b6708d5cb59464e%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C636638506652079180&sdata=yiinai1v5AV2iVGgfXxQkCZeVFIZpvU%2BgvGI36M1kBE%3D&reserved=0>. We should NOT be discussing which is the better way (we might as well start the tabs vs spaces while we’re at that), but instead how we bring more people on to using OCF and IoTivity. You don’t like it? That’s fine, I have no problem with that, but don’t judge people that is working just fine for. Ø Honestly, I recommend you spend some time working with Bazel before you decide it won't work That’s totally missing the point. We shouldn’t be picking favorites for other people here. I’m sure bazel is great, but I’m not about to change everything just to get my feet wet with IoTivity. I really hope OCF can build a community of developers contributing, blogging, creating samples, apps etc, but the attitude and arrogance that Gregg puts forth I hope he’ll in the future keep to himself, and let others lead who would be better at building a community of inclusivity. To be honest, Gregg’s email made me lose most of the respect and hopes I had left of OCF. He’s a big voice here and a huge contributor which I’m sure is valued at lot, so it’s sad to see such (to be blunt) arrogance at display. I’ve spent years being part of building, supporting and contributing to several developer communities (I was the first to be offered to be an AllJoyn ambassador and I’ve been awarded MVP for 8 years by Microsoft), and I share a spare-time interest in IoT/smarthome stuff. I’ll be honest I know very little about OCF/IoTivity (although I did get it to compile on multiple platforms – yes from the command line Gregg! – and sort of got a .NET wrapper around the C-API working). It’s been painful to say the least. I think I’ve been through enough struggles with IoTivity to have some insights in what I think could be better. IMHO If you can’t do a video that shows from scratch how to write an app, find a light, on your network turn it on/off in under two minutes, you’ve done a poor job at making things easy to get started. You need immediate success to get people hooked before you start making things harder (and again no light bulb exist with OCF built-in – you’ll need a bridge which is what I think Gregg was alluding to building, which again is yet another silly step to overcome). I’m guessing Gregg thinks such an exercise that’s absolutely silly and you need to do more to prove your worthiness to use OCF. This thread haven’t had many contributors, but please speak up how you’d like to see what’s needed to build a better community. Because I think we can do a lot better than what’s been at display so far. Thank you /Morten From: Morten Nielsen<mailto:m...@iter.dk> Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2018 4:34 PM To: Gregg Reynolds<mailto:d...@mobileink.com> Cc: iotivity-dev<mailto:iotivity-dev@lists.iotivity.org> Subject: Re: [dev] Where are the devs? I think with those responses it's clear where the devs are. I think that's all I can say to this From: Gregg Reynolds <d...@mobileink.com<mailto:d...@mobileink.com>> Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2018 5:54:13 PM To: Morten Nielsen Cc: iotivity-dev Subject: Re: [dev] Where are the devs? On Tue, Jun 5, 2018, 4:18 PM Morten Nielsen <m...@iter.dk<mailto:m...@iter.dk>> wrote: The device: how about a light bulb I can cheaply get at Amazon? Ok, so name it. You don't expect me to support everything, I hope. Second: bazel?!? Let me double click and open a solution and hit build in visual studio, the step through the code so I can understand jt. No. A dev who freaks when confronted with a command line is a amateur. Ioticity is not for amateurs. There's a reason Microsoft has decided to officially support bash. It's for professionals. Forgot command line. It's not easy enough for step one. Don't make me learn another build system as step 1. That's losing people immediately. Frankly, I don't care about those people. And anyway who said anything about learning another build system? You don't need to know anything about Bazel to execute "$ bazel build myapp". Any more than you need to know how make works to do "$ make". Next: there's platform APIs like Java. Where's the off client APIs hosted on maven that I just reference? Or .net APIs on nuget? Or all the other places app developers generally get their APIs for extending their apps. Respectfully, I don't know what you mean by "platform API". you mean language binding? But also I don't think you have thought this all the way through. Java binding- which architecture? You want to "just reference" a maven artifact? It's not, and cannot be, mere Java. I think your thinking about this all wrong. Java is just another language binding. For OpenOCF I've split it off into a separate repo, but I'm rethinking that. But either way, it doesn't matter with Bazel. You build your app, and any deps also get built, but only if needed. Honestly, I recommend you spend some time working with Bazel before you decide it won't work. I've worked with more build systems than I care to count, and Bazel is orders of magnitude better than any of them (with the possible exception of Boot, but that is clojure-specific).
