Friday, January 22, 2016

Plans for project migration on GitHub

Just to let you know what is happening with this project since the Google Code since the hosting repository shutdown was announced.

Impala is was previously hosted on Google Code, which went into only mode in August and was due to be shut down in January 2016.

We have recently migrated the project to GitHub. The most recent fork on which future changes will be made is https://github.com/realtimedespatch/impala until further notice are.

The project has not seen a lot of active development, but it is a core part of the software infrastructure at Realtime Despatch, where I am a part owner and have been Technical Director since 2009.

It has been fantastically effective at Realtime Despatch in creating a development and deployment platform which both aligns with our commercial objectives and suits our agile approach to software development.

We have no plans to 'market' or promote the project to a wider audience in a way that will increase the scope of the software we need to develop and support within the project. However, we will potentially add features as required to meet our own business needs.

The main focus of changes made in the GitHub fork are as follows:
  • bringing the code and examples up to date with the latest version of Spring (currently 4.2.4).
  • setting the compile compatibility flag to Java 1.6.
  • stripping out examples for older frameworks.
Going a bit further forward, my plans for the project are:
  • a project rename. There are too many other projects called 'Impala' (although there weren't when I chose the name originally). I need to decide how far to take this in terms of things like renaming files, and core packages, for example.
  • further slimming down the project by stripping out features that we no longer intend to support. However, no changes to the structure of core interfaces are planned.
  • porting and refining the documentation, focusing on more simple documentation based on the mode of operation that we are currently using at Realtime Despatch.