Notification Service: Now what (again!)?
7 December 2008Yes, I know — we’ve been here before, but since that time, we actually ticked off the first item on the list, so now it is time once again to contemplate where things go from here. We could just keep going down that list of items to the next issue and start making some additional message couriers, which would be fun, or we could just skip that for now and move on to something else.
One thing I forgot to mention in the last version of this post was the idea of spinning off a separate thread for sending out the notices. That’s another one of those things that I would really like to do, but like a number of such issues, I’ve just set off to the side in the interest of getting something to the point of actually working before investing too much in the bells and whistles. Now might be a good time to go back and explore that a little bit.
Another thing that I thought about doing was to build a few more example notice templates, particularly since Velocity 1.6 is now out. It would be fun to work up a few sample templates that leveraged some of the new capabilities the 1.6 release. But then, that thought got me thinking about the various applications for the notification service, and how all of the little services that we have built so far could leverage off of one another, and what kind of sample app could be constructed to best illustrate such use. Which got me thinking …
Before I started putting the source code out on Subversion, I used to release a complete .ear file, including all of the source code. I stopped doing that because, for one, now you can just connect to Subversion and pull down the source code yourself, and for another, now I produce the .ear file using Maven, and I’ve never taken the time to figure out how to produce an .ear file using Maven that includes the source code. So, I just stopped doing that.
The point, here, though, that I was trying to get to in my rambling, convoluted way, is that I was thinking that maybe, instead of an .ear file full of source code, I should release a different kind of file … a “demo” file that included an application server and a database (presumably Tomcat and HSSQLDB) that you could just unzip and fire up and get to all of the examples. That would seem to be more useful than an .ear file that you would have to deploy to your own server, and would be a much faster path to seeing some of these examples actually work.
Of course, I would want to upgrade all of the examples, and come up with a little nicer way to launch them all and explain them all, but still, that’s an interesting idea. One that would undoubtedly take a considerable amount of work to set up, but even so, an interesting idea. Something to consider, anyway.
Which brings us back to that same old question: what to do next?!
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