Is Apache MINA dead? (23/10/2013)

Question

At about four days ago, I started studying the Apache MINA framework. I particularly found it very interesting, but soon I noticed that the study material was incomplete. What I looked in the "user guide" site, I saw that it appeared to be outdated, mixing two libraries MINA 1.x to 2.x. It's been a while since I've seen a topic on the internet with a more current date. I've been researching and I think that makes about 1 year since MINA was updated.

My questions are:

1. Was the project was abandoned?

2. If so, what other project you readers and fellow programmers recommend, which has features like MINA?

3. If not, how could I talk to the designers? I tried to register by e-mail when they talked about "subscribe", but I could not. Actually, I got an error saying that my email could not be sent, even though I checked and corrected the shipping address.

Answer 1

The project is not dead.

• The last release was October 2012, which does not strike me as an impossibly long time for a stable Java project.
• Documentation varies project to project. 1.x and 2.x docs being mixed together implies the documentation is poor on the project, not that the project is dead.

More importantly to assess the health of a project it's best to check its issue tracking, which for MINA can be found here. There is activity as recent as November 6th (two weeks ago) from the project chairman, per this page. Also note there is development on MINA 3.0.0 documented in July 2013 (4 months ago). From reviewing this page it seems their next release will be 3.0.0, unless some urgent patch on 2.0 comes up.

This all being said I'm strongly under the impression that Netty is the more standard choice for an NIO framework - I would make sure to understand its feature set before implementing a MINA project.

Answer 2

For alternatives you can check Wikipedia:

1. Grizzly
2. Netty 3
3. QuickServer
4. xSocket