Hi Peter, I think you're absolutely right. Here are my comments on your points;
> 1. Importing River into your preferred IDE, including the tools.jar into > your classpath on the correct tested jdk environment and building it. I hope this experience will be improved when we (I) finish RIVER-301. The tools.jar thing I believe is RIVER-272. I seem to recall someone saying that they're looked at that and were reluctant to post their patch or that they were intending to look at it. (I might have dreamed that conversation though, can anyone else remember it?) > 2. Getting to know Rivers structure, how it all works, playing around with > it, writing some programs that use it to improve understanding. Unfortunately, I can't see a way around this without spending the personal effort to actually do the reading and coding required to get familiar. My advice, would be to pick one small area and get to know that and then branch out into other areas as and when. > 3. Getting to know how the integration tests work to improve confidence > your not breaking anything. This is RIVER-301 again. I've got an ant script that can now run the tests I just need to tidy it up and attach it to JIRA. It's not perfect, but since I don't understand how the integration tests work either, I'm having trouble making it so. Does anyone know where I can find a complete list of all the test categories? I don't seem to be able to find it and need it to complete the script. I think that the unit tests should be written for new code (someone's writing new code?) but I doubt that there'll be much take up on writing unit tests for existing code. > 4. Becoming confident enough to tackle some of the open issues. My advice is to just jump in. Pick an issue (any issue) and try to work through it. Attach the patch to JIRA and it'll eventually get looked at. I did this with RIVER-296 when I was in no way confident that I understood the code I was looking at. There are integration tests and dedicated committers who'll check through these things and get back to you if it's not correct. No one is going to be attacked (I hope, for my sake!) for attaching a patch that unintentionally breaks the build or isn't a complete fix. I hope that some of these comments (and the eventual completion of RIVER-301) will lower the entry barrier. I'd like to reiterate my final comment that you shouldn't be reluctant to get involved because you're not "confident enough". Nothing improves confidence like trying to solve a puzzle and eventually getting through it. That in and of itself gets you part the way up the learning curve. Cheers, Tom -----Original Message----- From: Peter Firmstone [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 13 March 2009 02:34 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Board Report is due... Hi, I'd like to contribute, I'm thinking about nio, SocketChannel and SSLSocketChannel, however I'm still new to Jini, so there's a relatively steep learning curve to overcome before I'll feel confident enough to do so. The obstacles that a new developer faces: 1. Importing River into your preferred IDE, including the tools.jar into your classpath on the correct tested jdk environment and building it. 2. Getting to know Rivers structure, how it all works, playing around with it, writing some programs that use it to improve understanding. 3. Getting to know how the integration tests work to improve confidence your not breaking anything. It'd be nice if there were some junit tests for the newer developer to improve confidence and to perform some checks before committing, unit tests could be added gradually by module and reduce the burden on the integration test developers. I'm bogged down here, I'm in the habit of using junit to assist in understanding code intricacies. 4. Becoming confident enough to tackle some of the open issues. There's heaps of documentation available regarding jini, what it is and supposed to do, however there's a significant learning curve before one can start using it. On another front, I'm interested in using it for JavaME CDC embedded devices, where I guess River has huge potential as these devices become more powerful and plentiful. I certainly want to see River succeed, it'd be a terrible shame to see it terminated, I think we just need to work on lowering the barriers to entry for new developers as an urgent priority. Perhaps a page on the website to guide new developers? Cheers, Peter Firmstone. Jukka Zitting wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Niclas Hedhman <[email protected]> wrote: > >> River PMC, >> please note that the quarterly Board report is due in a few days; >> Wednesday, 11 March 2009 >> > > We're already a bit late, so I just went ahead and filed the following report. > > <report> > River is aimed at the development and advancement of the Jini > technology core infrastructure. Jini technology is a service oriented > architecture that defines a programming model which both exploits and > extends Java technology to enable the construction of secure, > distributed systems which are adaptive to change. River has been > incubating since December 2006. > > The River project is not doing well. Practically all original > committers are inactive and while there are interested users and even > some pretty active discussions about the future of River, that > interest isn't showing up as patches or other more constructive > contributions. > > We've seen some effort towards making the QA test suite more > accessible, and there is interest in doing another release. However, > nobody is actively working on new features or bigger improvements. It > has been suggested that River needs a major new vision, but its > debatable whether that would do better as a fresh new project. In any > case nobody is actively pushing for anything like that. > > There is still hope for River, but at this rate the project is heading > for termination. > > Issues before graduation: > > * Re-activate the development community > * Migrate packages to org.apache.river > * Another Apache release > </report> > > BR, > > Jukka Zitting > > 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. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, please notify [email protected] immediately and delete it from your computer system. 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