JaRTI

From lbflabs

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Portico

In mid-2007 jaRTI was superceded by The Portico Project. The reason for this is outlined below.

If you would still like to visit to the old jaRTI site, click here.

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Portico Links


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Reason for Change

Below is a copy of the email sent to the jarti-announce mailing list on June 2nd, 2007. It explains what is happening and why.

Greetings one and all,

First, let me apologise. I promised you all a nice steaming bowl of jaRTI-0.7 a LONG time ago now, and as of yet, it has failed to eventuate. Secondly, let me say that there is an exciting reason for this, and one that will require a little bit of background.

The Procedural Stuff

Since its inception, jaRTI has received much more interest and attention than I had originally anticipated. We have had a lot of positive feedback from many people, and the community has continued to expand. However, when considering ways to grow the community even more, it became clear that one of the major hurdles we would have to eventually face was that of perception.

My PhD is coming to a close, and as such, it would be reasonable to expect that the amount of time I have available would diminish. As the primary developer, this is hardly an ideal situation. Although I would continue to make time for jaRTI as I have over the past two years, the momentum of the last 12 months would be unsustainable. We are a typical open source project: volunteer in nature, and as such, volatile from a longevity perspective. If we are to continue growing, the project must gain acceptance in places where these traits are not looked upon favourably – those places where commercial RTI-implementations are currently viewed as the only choice.

There are two things that are missing from jaRTI that must change if this is to be achieved. Firstly, a more professional image is needed, something to distinguish it from the side-project effort it has been up until now. Secondly, proper support is necessary (and commercial support where required).

The core development team continues to believe strongly that an open source RTI is something that has been missing from the HLA for far too many years, hence the reason we started the project in the first place. It seems that this opinion is one that has slowly begun to permeate the wider community as well, and to such a point that funding has now become available to help sustain some development.

Out of a desire to help take jaRTI from its current state and turn it into something that can achieve a much broader acceptance, and in accordance with the realizations about our inability to achieve this with current perceptions as mentioned above, the project is being re-branded. From this point on, jaRTI will no longer exist.

The Portico Project (URL at the bottom of this email) is being launched at the SimTecT conference in Brisbane, Australia this coming week (June 4-7), with Portico being the new name for the RTI. Along with this will be the announcement that some funding to add missing functionality and polish to Portico will be provided by the Australian Defence Force.

One of the primary goals of the Portico Project is to provide a professional quality, open, supported RTI. In time, it is anticipated that commercial support options will become available, but that discussion is premature at this time and dependant on convincing someone to actually provide it :P. From the perspective of people on this list, very little will change. We are still the same developers and it is still the same code. The name is changing, and the focus is expanding to include world domination, err, I mean enhanced functionality, yeeeees, functionality, that’s the one (phew, almost gave the game away!)

I’m sure that I don’t need to convince anyone here of the importance of an open source RTI, after all, you already went looking for one and found us! This move will help us expand the user base of the project and continue to grow the community.

The Practical Stuff

A new project has been registered with SourceForge, and the transition effort to move the code over has already been completed. Once a refactor of the preview C++ bindings developed by Michael Fraser is complete, binary installers will be made available (August is the deadline for this). Until then, Portico will only be available as source code through the new Subversion repository.

At this point in time, the core code is not substantially different from the jaRTI-0.7rc1 release. If you don’t want to compile your own versions of Portico, I’d suggest that you continue to download the current jaRTI zip/tarballs until a Portico binary is available. I will keep them available until well after the first official Portico release.

Along with the change of Sourceforge project comes a change in mailing list. I request, nay, beg that you all go and sign up to the new portico-announce list (URL at the end of this email). I like to use the number of people subscribed to the list as an indicator of the interest level in the project. I will post a couple more nagging reminders here in the near future, but after that, mail to this list will be no more.

If you happen to be attending SimTecT this forthcoming week, be sure to say hi. Sadly, I’ll be the only developer in attendance, but I promise that I’ll do my best to carry the torch. I shouldn’t be too hard to find, just look for a 6’ 4’’ bald man who looks as if he hasn’t slept in the last 6 months. I will also be giving a presentation on the internals of Portico on the Tuesday morning at 11:50. Note that when looking it up in the program, the title still refers to jaRTI :P

Wrap Up

I have removed the "moderation" flag for all the users on this list, so if you have any questions, comments, praise, hate-mail, or anything else that you would like to share, you can just reply to this email. Note that all responses will get sent out to the entire list, so if you want to chat privately, either pop by the IRC channel or send one of the developers an email (all details for that on the new site).

Finally, I need to send a giant thank-you out to [User:Michael|Michael Fraser] (who some of you have already interacted with). Without his efforts and marathon coding sessions in the labs, the project would not be what it is today. Thank you all for your support over the past year, the whole team is looking forward to your continued involvement and to producing a bigger, better open source RTI. Don’t forget to sign up to portico-announce!!

Cheers, Tim Pokorny, Lead Portico Developer

URLs of interest:

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