Latest Paho Status (2)

I last wrote about the state of Paho in October. This post is a continuation of that one.

Java Client

Some of you might know that James Sutton, who is co-project lead with me and has worked on the Paho project for several years, has moved jobs within IBM.  He intended to be able to spend some 20% of his time on the Java client, but that has proved infeasible up to now.  There was supposed to be an IBM replacement for James to work with me, but that arrangement has fallen through for the time being.  We hope that will actually happen early next year.

In the meantime, I’m going to look at the immediate needs for the Java client:

1. A service release of 1.2.1 to incorporate the fixes that have been made since 1.2.0, and maybe some others
2. Finish the tasks needed for the new MQTT 5.0 release, 1.3.  These are mainly around tests: adding some load tests and looking at unreliability in the Travis CI test runs.
3. Release 1.3 of the Java client.

Other components

I’m also working on, or being responsible for:

• the C client (MQTT V5 release completed)
• embedded C client (MQTT V5 work in progress)
• JavaScript client (MQTT V5 updates being thought about)
• MQTT test material
• embedded MQTT-SN client (shared with Tomoaki!)Python client (MQTT V5 only – first PR submitted, needs updates)

as well as the routine project lead and Eclipse IoT PMC work.  I mention this topic not to garner sympathy, but to ask for patience from those who are waiting for me to respond to issues and PRs, and to think more about how we can encourage more participation from our community to help the committers with their work.  And for contributors to become committers of course.

Welcoming Communities

I did write another blog post in June about how to get more help for the Paho project.  I had some useful responses and also found this guide on building welcoming open source communities. 

Looking at the Paho website it’s quite formal, and the text was mostly written years ago.  I’ve decided to re-write it so it focuses more on the Paho community, and how to get involved, as well as the software we provide.  Of course the website is not the only way that people find out about Paho, and indeed may not be the most frequent route.  That could well be through the Github repos, so each of them needs to empahisize the community aspects too.  For the repos I’m responsible for, I’ll make some changes, then talk/write about what I’ve done. 

Paho Logo

As part of the website update, I’d like to change the project logo too.  The existing Paho logo:

has been around from the beginning.  I’d like to make it more symmetrical  so it fits more nicely on laptops or websites.  That’s “as far as I’m concerned” of course, as it’s subjective, and I want to thank the person who put it together in the first place.  So I thought I’d have a go at producing a new one.  My very first quick attempt is:

a simple moving of the text within the bubble.  ‘Paho’ is a Maori word meaning ‘broadcast’, so I assume that the bubble signifies speech or some other method of sending messages.  I do have some other ideas that I’m working on too, but the reason for mentioning it now is to encourage contributions from anyone else who is interested.

Comment and contribute!

Please do comment on these thoughts or contribute any ideas.