2008/12/11 Niclas Hedhman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > </snip> > Well, I will stop arguing about what I think is wrong, and just go out > and make the changes I think is necessary. And funny enough, it is not > that much that needs to be changed. If I am not welcome to do so that > here at River, then fine, I bring the codebase elsewhere. >
When Jini, and JavaSpaces where first conceived many years ago now things were in a very different state to what we have now. For a start the language has been refined, the JVM is now very stable and is very efficient compared to those early days. We have lots of nice new features, and some excellent tools to make our programming days so much easier. But here in the river incubator we say 'bah!' to all these new tools, and state that what we have is good enough. Well actually no. We are not leading the curve, we are some way behind now. The last few projects I have worked on, the developers wont entertain 'download a zip, unpack, shuffle the jars, curse, read the docs' type approach. They just want to add the dependency to their pom, and off they go. I asked a friend who has been involved in this technology for a longer long time, just when was the last time you used norm, or mercury ? Exactly. I think I fired them up for a test, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. So why do I seem them clogging up my release download ? Where I'm basically heading here, is.. lets get radical. nicals, if you want to change stuff. Do it. Prove it works. Get people using it and off we go. It's how apache got where it is today. It's where the name came from, people supplying patches to make it better. There are lots of cool toolkits for developing services using this technology, river is the bottom layer. The enabler. Lets focus on making it easier for these toolkits to grow by listening to the needs of these developers, not dictating the state of the world. However, I have to admit. I'm not really debating anymore, I'm doing. If it means a split away from river, then so be it. And to be honest, it's already happened. So many times I see "I've made a local change to allow..... blah blah blah", so why wasn't it easy to get that change into the code base in the first place ? So I guess it comes to this. Is river just a place where Sun has parked jini, so legacy codebases can get access to the old code, or is it a place where we can start to build the tools for the next generation of distributed systems ? --Jools
