River revamp

[Peter Firmstone <pe...@zeus.net.au>]

A discussion recently ignited on river private about revamping the project.

For the benefit of the wider developer community can we restate the suggestions here, feel free to reword, correct, reject or suggest.  It was along the lines of:

* Website revamp
* Remove Jini focus, with a historical section...
* Focus on new security features.
* Make getting started simple, with just the bare bones basics, Extensible remote invocation with secure serialization. 
* Services, Javaspaces etc, become examples of what can be done with River, not what River  is.

Regards,

Peter.



Sent from my Samsung device.
 

Re: River revamp

[Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>]

To put a bit more meat on Peter's condensed list...

I put forward a proposal to sever the ties between River and Jini itself,
and instead re-focus River to be a a secured network transport, with
optional discovery. Starting point is of course the JERI module and Peter's
work to secure this transport, but in the longer term look at alternative
transport formats and eventually bindings to other languages, which I think
will be the major hurdle for long term acceptance (no one is Java-only
nowadays).

Jini's services, Reggie and so on, carries a lot of negative connotation
among people who were around back then, and except for where it has been
adopted, I doubt that there will be any new uptake, so instead of making
Jini (and its specs) the focal point of River, make it to "Examples of what
River can be used for".

Another example of what can be done with River could eventually include
connectors for popular platforms, such as Zookeeper, which could open
avenues for new blood coming to River.

Concrete things; Apache Karaf is also a very small community, yet they have
managed to put together a very exciting website, and I think River
community could "borrow" a lot of that work, making itself more appealing,
promoting the new focus. I don't think much coding is needed to get this
going, but packaging might be "fixed" to make consumption of the core
functionality as easy as possible, preferably easier than that.

Once that is up-and-running starting the "reach out" to other projects,
individuals and press releases.


I hope that this will inspire some to more action.

Niclas





On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Peter Firmstone <peter.firmstone@zeus.net.au
> wrote:

> A discussion recently ignited on river private about revamping the project.
>
> For the benefit of the wider developer community can we restate the
> suggestions here, feel free to reword, correct, reject or suggest.  It was
> along the lines of:
>
> * Website revamp
> * Remove Jini focus, with a historical section...
> * Focus on new security features.
> * Make getting started simple, with just the bare bones basics, Extensible
> remote invocation with secure serialization.
> * Services, Javaspaces etc, become examples of what can be done with
> River, not what River  is.
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter.
>
>
>
> Sent from my Samsung device.
>
>



-- 
Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer
http://zest.apache.org - New Energy for Java