Sim IJskes - QCG wrote:
Peter Firmstone wrote:
Sim & Gregg had a recent discussion about utilising a Static Factory
to help beginners grasp the power and purpose of Jini / River, perhaps
someone has an implementation they might like to contribute?
Well, we could aim for something far more simple than the JSK? Something
with real simple exports. I've got a Exporter class somewhere, you only
give it the component name and the reference to the service
implementation and it works. I also got a ReggieStarter class lying
around, which starts reggie from within the program with minimal config.
If we provide a global instance of a Configuration object that produces
a minimal config, would that be enough to get people started?
I think we really should look over com.sun.jini.start.* and in particular the
actions in ServerStarter to see if there is a simpler way to use the package
programatically. It's already fairly painless to create instances of the
various ServiceDescriptor implementation classes and create() running service
instances.
In the past, I've played with some ideas that are visible in the
(http://whatsitdo.dev.java.net project) and elsewhere
(http://startnow.dev.java.net and the PersistentJiniService class) to try and
work on reducing startup time. I have some other things laying around as well.
In the end, what I think is the top issue, is that we have Rio, Seven,
com.sun.jini.start, and many other ways to "launch" services, and none really
have a common base that allows deployment of the same artifacts in all cases.
There is always some type of configuration or deployment control that needs to
be provided. I still think that this is not a "value added issue." I think
that the details of a Jini service are all well described by the same set of
data in all cases, but it's just packaged differently, and that creates a gulf
across which few people can travel.
Gregg Wonderly
