Thank you for your thoughts/ideas about Google Summer of Code projects
for ECF. I am really interested in OSGI Remote Service . So I would like to develop a test framework for remote service. I Will do some research and post an update to dev@ ASAP
Here are some thoughts/ideas about Google Summer of Code projects
for ECF. Many of them are building upon projects that gsoc students
have worked on in the past...and then become ECF committers (going
from being a gsoc student to an ECF committer is not automatic, but
if that's what you want to do and your project is sufficiently
valuable, it is a possible path going forward).
Before I describe some individual projects, I should say that
recently (over past 1.5 years or so), loosely speaking there have
generally been 4 major technical 'themes' for ECF:
1) Remote services - ECF is one of the impls of the OSGi remote
services (RS) standard, and the remote service admin (RSA) standard
[1]. There's been a lot of work done in this area, and there are,
IMHO, potentially several good gsoc project for people interested in
this area. ECF has a 'provider architecture', meaning that it's
possible replace the underlying remoting transport (even at
runtime), and still remain completely compliant with the RS/RSA
standard.
Some ideas in this area:
a) New distribution and discovery providers: I've been working on a
Restlet-based remote services provider [1a], and other providers are
certainly possible...e.g. ones based upon other rest frameworks
(e.g. jax-rs), etc. Also there is desire to have more/other
discovery providers (our discovery API is similarly
provider-based)...we already have zookeeper, dnssd, zeroconf,
slp...and others are certainly possible. Further, several of the
existing providers could probably use some upgrading of versions,
etc.
b) A test framework for testing remote services. Since remote
services by definition involve inter-process communication, there is
very little in the support for unit testing of network discovery
and/or remote services.
c) Assisting in moving the ECF remote services implementation up to
the latest version of the OSGi specification. I don't know what's
involved here yet (as I haven't examined the most recent version of
the spec closely), but I expect that there will be some enhancements
to RS/RSA that ECF would like to support.
d) Example applications, tutorials, and documentation. ECF has a
documentation sub-project [1b]...and it would be very nice to have
some more extended/complete tutorials and example around remote
services. In fact, it would be very nice to have some example
remote services running all the time...for example to allow Eclipse
(and ECF) users to access some service....for
communication/collaboration, for remote testing (perhaps coordinated
with 'b'), for remote compiling/building, etc. Plenty of other
services are possible (e.g. integration with google, amazon, or
other services, etc).
e) ECF has several unique aspects relative to other OSGi remote
services implementations: i) We have support for asynchronous
remote services built in already [10]....ii) we have a provider
architecture...allowing consumers to 'mix and match' discovery and
distribution providers as needed.
2) Example...and/or Full Applications - ECF's Salvo newsreader is a
one such application [2], and there has also been a lot of work with
Real-Time shared editing, including using the google wave
implementation as a provider [3a].
3) Real-Time Collaboration Systems. ECF has already been used to
implement Coffee [4], shared code [5], and other real-time developer
collaboration systems. There is certainly a lot more room for work
here, however...and with the emphasis on remote services over the
past few years, and the changes in Eclipse (e.g. toward Orion and
e4) I think there are a lot more new opportunities here.
4) There was a lot of work in voice-over-ip around 2 years ago...but
it seems to have slowed down some. I'm not really sure why...as I
think it would be great to jump-start the work in VOIP
again...particularly with the smart phones, etc.
5) Anything having to do with OSGi on servers...for mobile, iPod,
Android, iPhone, etc as clients...for real-time collaboration,
communication, games (e.g. see [11],[12]) and simulation [13]).
Here are some other useful links...See section s: 'Other Cool
Stuff' and 'Presentations' on [6] and [7], [8], [9].
On 3/29/2012 1:08 PM, tishan pubudu kanishka dahanayakage wrote:
Hi devs,
I am a third year undergraduate at University of Moratuwa,
Sri Lanka. I have good knowledge in java and have studied ECF
platform a little during the past few days. I went through your
project site and wiki. And I found the project is interesting.
So I would like to contribute to your project. I already went
through your API and also bug list. But still could not find any
lead to a good idea to implement. So can anybody enlighten me on
this.
