Hi all,
I've been watching these "Future of Jini/River" emails with interest these past few days, and being new to the River dev community I started getting pretty excited about all The Next Big Things that River could accomplish. This excitement then got reduced to disappointment by Dan... "...I'm pleased to see this debate. However, I've seen it a number of times before and it's ultimately yielded no advancement... Will it be any different this time?" - Dan Creswell 12/11/08 So here's my attempt to make things different this time. I've just finished going through the emails of the past few days and picking out all the bits and pieces people have said they want or that we "must" see before the project can take off and go places. The good (maybe) news is there are lots of different ideas. Here is my proposal. 1) Everyone who cares read this list (at bottom of email). Let's spend until Friday 21 November (Warning: date chosen at random) adding to and correcting it. 2) Spend the following 7 days (until Friday 28 November) doing three things: a. Identifying The Ultimate Goal, e.g. a gazillion downloads every day, River running on every toaster, sexiest user experience in the world, whatever b. Decide on top two areas which are important to the community, e.g. Easy get-up-and-go for developers, better/some developer tools, adoption of more protocols and options, performance enhancements, new features, bug fixes, business tools for River systems (IncaX replacement?), full Apache adoption etc c. Put our wish list under the categories of the top two important areas, everything else (however cool) gets archived until we start getting somewhere with our chosen two areas 3) We take a consensus of the dev list to decide which of these things has what priority, we put /dates and names/ against of them. 4) Then we start getting things done. 5) ... 6) Profit! (Sorry, couldn't resist that one.) I understand that some people are only interested in certain parts of River and those parts may not make it into the Top Two this time round. But we have to start somewhere and as others have said, unless we agree on a /limited/ direction we'll all be trying to do too much, in too many different directions and we'll get no where. So I encourage everyone to get involved regardless of where your own pet-features land in the priority lists. As I said, I'm new to the dev community, so if this is the wrong approach or if there is a better tool than the mailing list, or if I've trod on someone else's toes and I'm out of line, then I apologise. I'm just eager to get involved and help to push this project forwards - for whatever value of "forwards" the community decides on. Note: Please forgive me if I have attributed an idea to the wrong person, any such instances are mistakes and not intentional. Note: I fully expect that I have put some things in the wrong categories or chosen wrong categories entirely. Please don't get sidetracked by that, the item itself and not its category is what's important. The list follows. Cheers, Tom (Apache) Adoption * Release AR2 (Everyone all the time?) * Namespace change (River-261) * "Let's make the code easy to get, easy to build, easy to use. Let's post nightly builds" (Jeff Ramsdale 12/11/08) * Roadmap, release schedule, plan of regular releases (Jeff Ramsdale 12/11/08) * Commit patches already committed (Craig L Russel 10/11/08) * Marketing-style blurb; why YOU should use River (Tom Hobbs 14/11/08) * publish and promote [the River project] (Jeremy Easton-Marks 10/11/08) Beginner Use * Provide some clever default services to get up and running with - "Fast Track" (Niclas Hedhman 13/11/08) * Program to probe hardware and recommend Jini config (Jools 13/11/08) * "Build a Jini service with UI in 10 minutes" tools/help/examples? (Calum Shaw-Mackay 12/11/08) Developer Use * Netbeans and Eclipse tools (Wade Chandler 13/11/08) * Cleaner API for "ease of use" (Wade Chandler 13/11/08) * Annotations and abstract classes for service start points (Wade Chandler 13/11/08) * Make it easier to checkout code and run tests locally (Niclas Hedham 10/11/08) Advanced Use * Easily navigatable documentation for (more) advanced concepts and options (RMI vs JERI, Transient/Persistent/Activation, Configuration etc) (Tom Hobbs/Niclas Hedhman 13/11/08) * Provide skeleton examples of services that fulfil some common business goal, syncing, failover etc - think distributed GoF-style design patterns (Tom Hobbs 14/11/08) Enhancements * Move to Java 1.5 (Wade Chandler 13/11/08) * "supporting CLDC(MIDP) and CDC" (Wade Chandler 13/11/08) * Support for simplified testing (Niclas Hedhman 13/11/08) * Bug fixes (everyone all the time?) * New lookup service (Gregg Wonderly 11/11/08) * Jini Desktop environment (Gregg Wonderly 11/11/08) * Password access (Gregg Wonderly 11/11/08) * Proxied Authorization (Gregg Wonderly 11/11/08) * richer set of APIs for GUI based service UI (Gregg Wonderly 10/11/08) * inbound calls run as the remote user's Subject (Gregg Wonderly 10/11/08) * zero code downloads at startup (Gregg Wonderly 10/11/08) * River-based BPM/Orchestration capability (Sam Chance 10/11/08) * Replacement for IncaX (since that it is no longer supported) (Sam Chance/Tom Hobbs 10/11/08) * "Using River, build an internet scale, decentralized, autonomic, dynamic PF&B service management APPLICATION that is browser base, OSGi technology based and Service Component Architecture (SCA) based. The framework should allow rapid creation and deployment of services. The binding protocol should be based on ATOM or something similarly open. It shoud allow end users to build ad hoc worklfow by combining services. It should not be wed to SOAP, but allow SOAP. It should allow REST also." (Sam Chance 10/11/08) * Configuration System (Niclas Hedhman 10/11/08) * User-type targetted Security System documentation (Niclas Hedhman 10/11/08) www.sucden.co.uk Sucden (UK) Limited, 5 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9SG Telephone +44 20 7940 9400 Registered in England no. 1095841 VAT registration no. GB 446 9061 33 Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and entered in the FSA register under no. 114239 This email, including any files transmitted with it, is confidential and may be privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. 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