Hello River folk, please review / comment / suggest / changes for the
draft board report for February below.
Regards,
Peter.
## Description:
- Apache River provides a platform for dynamic discovery and lookup
search of network services. Services may be implemented in a number
of languages, while clients are required to be jvm based (presently at
least), to allow proxy jvm byte code to be provisioned dynamically.
## Issues:
- There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.
## Activity:
- Minimal activity at present, initial work on the modular build
structure has commenced. The current monolithic build is complex, with
it's own build tool classdepandjar, it adds complexity for new
developers. In recent months I have had work committments that have
limited my ability to integrate the modular build. The other committers
are waiting for the modular build and I have done a lot of work on this
locally, this work has been a significant undertaking integrating the
works of Dennis Reedy, Dan Rollo and myself. This is also a mature
codebase, having been in development since the late 1990's.
- The monolithic code has been svn moved into modules into an initial
maven build structure, next step is to move junit tests to each module.
- Until the monolithic build has been broken up into maven modules, we
are likely to have difficulty attracting new contributors due to the
appearance of complexity.
Release roadmap:
River 3.1 - Modular build restructure (& binary release)
River 3.2 - Input validation 4 Serialization, delayed unmarshalling&
safe ServiceRegistrar lookup service.River 3.3 - OSGi support
## Health report:
- River is a mature codebase with existing deployments, it was
primarily designed for dynamic discovery of services on private
networks. IPv4 NAT limitations historically prevented the use of River
on public networks, however the use of IPv6 on public networks removes
these limitations. Web services evolved with the publish subscribe
model of todays internet, River has the potential to dynamically
discover services on IPv6 networks, peer to peer, blurring current
destinctions between client and server, it has the potential to address
many of the security issues currently experienced with IoT and avoid any
dependency on the proprietary cloud for "things".
- Future Direction:
* Target IOT space with support for OSGi and IPv6 (security fixes
required prior to announcement)
* Input validation for java deserialization - prevents DOS and
Gadget attacks.
* IPv6 Multicast Service Discovery (River currently only supports
IPv4 multicast discovery).
* Delayed unmarshalling for Service Lookup and Discovery (includes
SafeServiceRegistrar mentioned in release roadmap), so
authentication can occur prior to downloading service proxy's,
this addresses a long standing security issue with service lookup
while significantly improving performance under some use cases.
* Security fixes for SSL endpoints, updated to TLS v1.2 with removal
of support for insecure cyphers.
* Secure TLS SocketFactory's for RMI Registry, uses
the currently logged in Subject for authentication.
The RMI Registry still plays a minor role in service activation,
this allows those who still use the Registry to secure it.
* Maven build to replace existing ant built that uses
classdepandjar, a bytecode dependency analysis build tool.
* Updating the Jini specifications.
## Project Composition:
There are currently 16 committers and 12 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 4:3.
## Community changes, past quarter:
No new PMC members. Last addition was Dan Rollo on 2017-12-01.
No new committers. Last addition was Dan Rollo on 2017-11-02.
## Project Release Activity:
- Recent releases:
River-3.0.0 was released on 2016-10-06.
river-jtsk-2.2.3 was released on 2016-02-21.
river-examples-1.0 was released on 2015-08-10.
