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Re: [equinox-dev] Equinox summary and direction
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I'm particularly interested in the work on declarative and dynamic
services, so please keep me in the loop on these.
Thanks,
Nick
Jeff McAffer/Ottawa/IBM@IBMCA
Sent by: equinox-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx
07/07/2004 11:47 PM
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[equinox-dev] Equinox summary and direction
First, thanks to everyone who has worked so hard on Equinox over the past
year and a bit. The project has been an unqualified success. The main
task was to identify and prototype an alternative runtime for Eclipse
which offered standardization, dynamic behaviour and security. OSGi fits
the bill on all fronts and perhaps more importantly, we have found it fits
well under Eclipse. So well in fact that the code developed in Equinox
has been adopted by the main Eclipse project and was just shipped with
Eclipse R3.0. Congratulations!
The Equinox project has been a bit of a test case approach for incubating
new technology for use in the Eclipse platform. It has had a secondary
role as a path for others to get involved in Eclipse and ultimately gain
commit rights. Again here the project has succeeded with four of the OSGi
code contributors now being full Eclipse committers in the Platform Core
component. I would not be surprised to see further incubator projects
spring up.
We could stop here and be quite satisfied. I believe there is more to do
however. While the details are somewhat fluid, the current direction is
to continue Equinox as a place to explore new runtime related technologies
that we expect to, if successful, directly impact the Eclipse Platform
proper. These should be items whichAn incomplete, randomly ordered list
includes:
- Security: This include understanding the impact of running with Java 2
security enabled as well as approaches to and facilities for application
level security (e.g, authentication, ACLs, ...)
- Scalability: Technology that helps Eclipse scale up to more effeciently
handle 1000s of plugins as well scale down to smaller platforms and
reduced functionality scenarios. Examples include declarative service
specification and framework/runtime refactoring.
- Support for dynamic behaviour and services programming: The runtime
fully supports the dynamic coming and going of plugins but it is clear
that this support is challenging to put in place. We need higher level
abstractions, mechanisms and best practices for handling the changing
environment.
Some of this work may well happen in the main Eclipse repository. What
work gets done in the Equinox vs Eclipse repos largely depends on a) how
speculative the work is and b) who is doing the work. We intend to remain
as flexible as possible in this area.
Since the bulk of the work items have been complete the project resources
(CVS, Bugzilla, ...) should be cleaned up and prepared for new work. In
particular:
- repopulate the repository with the Eclipse R3.0 code as required (note
that this should be done in a different directory structure under the
org.eclipse.equinox folder to reduce confusion)
- move the Equinox bugs to a to be created Platform Runtime component (the
exact details are being ironed out)
- scrub the committer list. Over the past year+ we added a number of
committers to look at specific work items or areas. For the most part,
these items are complete and the committers are no longer active. The
committer list will be reduced to include only those making commitments to
work on items with specific plans. The committer list was always intended
to be quite dynamic both in additions and deletions. Removal from the
list now in no way prohibits subsequent readdition. I will discuss their
status with each committer over the next few days.
- scrub the website. The website was at best sporatically maintained. The
result is an obsolete and rather incoherent mass of content. Over the
next few days I will version off and clean up the site and unlink or
delete stale content. Note that everything is in CVS so nothing is ever
deleted for real. Going forward we should have a plan for how to evolve
the site content in a more coherent way. Your suggestions are most
welcomed.
Let me know if something has been missed or you have any questions or
concerns in this area.
Again, thanks to everyone for the hard work. We have definitely left
Eclipse better than we found it.
Jeff