Re: River and Backward Compatibility

I believe that the issue were discussing is a classic issue of
technology evolution.

On one hand we have a relatively mature jini framework that was built
almost 10 years ago and on the other hand many things have changed from
that period of time in the technology landscape which should be
considered if we want to make the Jini/JavaSpaces technology relevant to
mainstream developers. Jini was a head of it time for quite some time
and it looks like the awareness for scalability and the need for dynamic
services creates a new opportunity to make it more relevant today then
ever before.

We tried to address similar challenge through a project we refer to as
OpenSpaces (Overview:
http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/GS6/Open+Spaces+Overview, FAQ:
http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/GS6/Open+Spaces+Frequently+Asked+
Questions). 

With this project we introduce major enhancement such as support for
POJO and annotations as entries, declarative transaction model etc. We
provide tutorial that shows those the difference between using the pure
JavaSpaces model with and without those enhancements as a walkthrough
example(http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/QSG6/JavaSpaces+Tutorial+
A+-+Plain+JavaSpaces)

Those enhancements is provided as an extension to the existing
JavaSpaces specification through set of abstraction layer and wrappers
in order to maintain backward compatibility. In addition to that we had
chosen to do that step outside of the Jini community at first in order
that we will have enough experience with the new model before the
community can even decide whether to adopt it or not and in order that
we will have enough opportunity to attract more of the mainstream
developers into this sort of discussions.

So I think that that you can still introduce innovation and even radical
enhancements without breaking the backward compatibility and openspaces
is an example for that.


HTH
Nati S.
GigaSpaces

-----Original Message-----
From: Nirmalya Sengupta [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 9:50 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: River and Backward Compatibility

I belong to the posse of 'slient members' of this community.
While I don't work with a committed Jini/JavaSpaces shop, I
try to (and have succeeded a couple of times) to generate
some palpable interest about the subject and its promises, in the
minds of men who matter. This makes me remain a silent watcher of
the conversations happening in the ring most of the time, and
allows me to infrequently install and run some PoC using the
latest version to prove a point or write a white-paper for my
employers.

Having said all these, I must also add that forking at the
River (desperate attempt to sound poetic) is something we all
should avoid and prevent. In any case, JavaSpaces does not hold
that much of mind-share in the development community world over,
as much we would like to. Forking will drag the subject into
unnecessary controversy and may engender some to jump the ship.

In this light, keeping backward compatibility is a necessity, I feel;
unless of course, that is leading to meaningless complexity. Let's
face it: to an average JavaSpaces enthusiast, tweaking the software
is not an easy job. I would guess that by safeguarding the backward
compatibility, we would help such people.

My 0.5 cents, and Brian++ (+2, that is), from me.

Nirmalya
Pune
India
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