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PMC Conference Call - March 15, 2005
Attending: Tim Wagner [TW], Arthur Ryman [AR], David Williams [DW], Dominique De Vito [DV], Jochen Krause [JK] Others: Lawrence Mandel (representing WTP community) [LM]

Procedural matters – none

Community from Lawrence Mandel

  • W-S validation project approved to move into WTP; code will be merged this week (includes the SOAP monitor)
  • Help system work in flight; hoping to have it up this week
  • External communications – OOPSLA coming up. LM will be submitting a tutorial, demo, and possibly a panel session; theme will be “Using WTP for teaching J2EE”.
  • For this and any other external communication, please let LM know so that he can post events to the community page, and also serve as a clearing house for slide decks and other shareable material.
  • Download statistics. These are tracked when downloads are performed through the correct PHP script. JK pointed out that we want to track our download frequency so that we can monitor overall use as well as changes w.r.t. WTP events. Download statistics can be tracked at www.eclipse.org/downloads/stats.php?filename=wtp-. DW reported that weÂ’re around 20K downloads for M3. LM will periodically report on changes in download frequency.
[PMC members only for the remaining portion of the meeting]

Requirements group [JK]

  • BEA nominated Paul Meijer to work with Jochen
  • Jochen working independently for past week; will set date for initial meeting with Paul and other interested parties this week

Architecture Group [DW]

  • Kevin Haaland and Ted Bashor joined the group
  • Spent a significant amount of time discussing “operations”, and the differing frameworks for them. Kevin reported that platform is attempting to drive adoption of a single solution.
  • Other issues included an edit model in EMF and moving the extensible navigator to the platform from WTP.
  • Process involves weekly conference calls for the group, community review of proposals (see below), and architectural reviews with component leads. Individuals will be selected to drive cross-project or cross-component (within WTP) architectural challenges.
  • Bugzilla entries filed by architecture group for changes that need to be made or issues being tracked can be found at this URL.

Bundled WTP Downloads [AR]

  • Two bundled packages available: one with eclipse, wtp, emf, gef, jem, and xerces, another with all of that buteclipse
  • Plan is to do this for each milestone; Jeffrey Liu owns updating build scripts to do this automatically.

wtp-pmc mailing list

  • For maximum transparency of our operations, the WTP PMC agreed to disband the ObjectWeb-hosted mailing list and recreate one of the same name hosted on Eclipse. It would continue to be used for administrative purposes, and we would discourage threads better expressed on wtp-dev.

APIs

  • Jeffrey Liu handling the scanning process.
  • component.xml updates are in flight; would like to see this finished quickly, but DW reports that not all component teams can complete the work this week; this will be the first step in distinguishing our true API
  • renaming non-API public methods to “…internal” is in flight
  • use of the “internal.provisional” naming scheme ratified
  • rdb will be entirely internal; whether we will pre-name components for their post migration location is still TBD [next meeting is 3/17]
  • M4 process will be (in order): define component.xml files, drive for javadoc and junit coverage, correct naming conventions, work on implementation
  • PMC will review component.xml progress next week and will review statistics on an ongoing basis as part of our weekly call agenda; component leads should be prepared for PMC review starting next week
  • Currently have ~14K “APIs” without JUnit tests; number needs to drop through additional tests and by interning unintentional APIs

Plans for integrating BEA developers

  • IBM sites will host “immersion” days for BEA developers to help them ramp up on technology, people, and processes

Maintenance Releases

Both BEA and IBM will be basing products on WTP 1.0, so we need to plan for a 1.0.x maintenance stream. This will need to be coordinated with the platform maintenance stream. Planning should begin now to ensure that this is handled smoothly; a single “release manager” would be ideal. Since Naci’s team currently handles build, we’ll revisit this next week when he’s present.

Handling Third Party Content

[quoted from ArthurÂ’s notes]

I have been working with Janet Campbell, the Eclipse Foundation IP lawyer, to get permission to redistribute some 3PC (from Apache, W3C, etc). This is going to be a slow process. Also, our policy to to not reship runtimes. These two considerations combine to produce a difficult situation for our users who have to namually download and install many pieces.

I'd like to suggest an alternative. I'm calling these "Wormholes". The idea is to create Update Manager sites at Apache, W3C, ObjectWeb, SourceForge, etc. We would create a project at each of those sites and package the code we need. We would create extension points for this content, e.g. a Server Runtine extension point and the Jonas, Tomcat, Geronimo, Jigsaw, etc. runtimes could be packaged to extend that runtime. We would preload the URLs to these sites in WTP. Then the user could easily download and install the 3PC. This fineses the installation, configuration, legal, and maintenance problems.

To start, we could create an "ObjectWeb-Eclipse Wormhole" for Jonas. Next would be an "Apache-Eclipse Wormhole".for Tomcat, Axis, etc. We need to propose an Apache project for that, and the more companies who could participate, the stronger our proposal is. I've already run this by Mike Milinkovich and he likes the idea.

This would be targeted for M5. JK noted that placing, e.g., JBoss in the plugins directory is not ideal for everyone, so this would have to be optional. If ObjectWeb cannot host, then BEA and IBM could work on a joint Apache proposal.

Action Items:

  • [JK] Call requirements group meeting.
  • [TW] Disband existing wtp-pmc distribution list and recreate it on Eclipse.
  • [AR] Proposal for 3PC downloads.
Minutes taken by Tim Wagner, March 15, 2005
 

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