On Mar 13, 2009, at 5:41 AM, Tom Hobbs wrote:
Perhaps it is time to restart the Jini/River project.
Although that sounds sort of tempting, it didn't work for Netscape
and I think such an approach should be avoided.
What I think is interesting is the continued conversation about the
code. I am really troubled by this, because, I personally have no
problems looking through the code and making sense of it. I don't
think that the code has problems as much as the developers' visible
APIs are not "like everyone elses way of doing things."
Clearly there are several large bits of code, built on top of Jini,
which provide a completely different programming experience/APIs as
their visible API than the core Jini APIs. Jini APIs are, on purpose,
low level APIs designed for putting together larger functionalities
built around the concepts of secure, mobile Java code in concert with
the core features which Jini provides, namely lookup, distributed 2PC
transactions, distributed leasing and remote eventing.
Things like the ConfigurationFile implementation of the Configuration
interface, remote eventing, ServiceDiscoveryManager,
LeaseRenewalManager and others, are things built on top of the core
Jini functions to provide more convenient access to these functions
for the developer.
Others things can be done on top of the core. The fact that so many
others have done this speaks clearly, for me to the separation points
that the current River/Jini APIs provide. Jini should really be viewed
as a platform, not as a "solution" or "service".
We clearly can take a lot of different convenience functions and
useful extensions that have gelled into many of these large Jini
projects and push them back into the River project as recommended ways
to do those things.
We can also just sit around and say that rewriting it or making
something different or forking would solve all our problems. I'm not
convinced that those choices do anything except further fragment the
concepts into even more ways of doing similar things with no
interworking standards.
Gregg Wonderly
