[ecf-dev] what's going on with ECF

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

It's time for ab update from me about what's going on with ECF. There 
hasn't been much traffic on ecf-dev, but that doesn't mean that nothing 
is going on...in fact it more likely means that more is going on :).

1) ECF committer Jan Rellermeyer has recently made a contribution of 
allowing the rosgi distribution provider to run over websockets. For 
those that are not aware, websockets is a recently finalized standard 
for doing data communication over http/https.
2) I have been recently engaged in adding to 1 to create two new ECF 
remote services distribution providers, one for rosgi-over-http, and the 
other for rosgi-over-https.

With 1 and 2, it allows ECF consumers to run arbitrary remote services 
over http/https with *no* changes to the service. Obviously, one big 
appeal is that websockets works through most modern proxies and 
firewalls.   It also further demonstrates the power of ECF's open 
provider architecture, where if you want would like to run arbitrary 
standardized remote services over a private, new, or other transport 
protocol, all that's needed is a new provider.  And creating a new ECF 
remote services provider is getting continuously easier [1].

Especially with Internet of Things, where new messaging protocols are 
appearing all the time (e.g. MQTT, COAP, etc., etc) ECF remote services 
provides an ideal way to develop standardized remote services between 
devices and/or servers [3], while insulating the application from 
variability in the underlying transport.   For example, it would be 
completely feasible..even easy...to develop using one distribution 
provider, and then deploy/run on another. This represents a new and very 
useful separation of concerns for building networked applications, and 
ECF's open provider architecture (along with support of standards) is 
unique in allowing such an approach.

Also:  it's probably not as well-known, but in addition to the 
distribution providers distributed by EF (rosgi, ECF generic/ssl, XMPP, 
REST, SOAP), we also have a number of providers available via our github 
location [2]:

1) Websockets (the work from Jan described in 1 above)
2) JMS (a JMS/ActiveMQ-based distribution provider)
3) Mqtt-Provider (A distribution provider based upon Paho impl of MQTT)
4) RestletProvider (A distribution provider based upon Restlet)
5) etcd-provider (A discovery provider that uses an etcd server)

If others have updates about things that are going on (committers and/or 
contributors) please feel free to speak up.   I'm sure everyone would 
like to be updated about what's going on.

If you have any questions about anything, please just ask.

Scott

[1] 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Tutorial:_ECF_Remote_Services_for_Accessing_Existing_REST_Services
[2] https://github.com/ECF
[3] 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Tutorial:_OSGi_Remote_Services_for_Raspberry_Pi_GPIO