[ecf-dev] ECF 3.8.1/Luna status

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

As far as I'm concerned, ECF 3.8.1/Luna is complete.  A quick summary of 
what's happened and what's ahead:

1) Thanks to ECF committer Jan Rellermeyer, the rosgi provider has been 
updated to support Java8 [1].   Incidentally, if someone has an answer 
to my build/releng question in comment 25 [2], please answer on the bug.

2) I've made a number of small fixes/updates/simplifications to the 
feature meta-data.

3) I've removed most of the old contents of org.eclipse.ecf.doc (the 
Eclipse help docs that come with ECF), and replaced it with some docs 
and with pointers to the OSGi Remote Services documentation in the wiki [3].

4) Made a number of other small meta-data fixes.

According to me, the above means that ECF 3.8.1/Luna is pretty much 
complete, and so I'm personally moving on to focus on ECF's support for 
RSA 1.1 specification.  Before discussing that work below, however, I 
want to request that people on this list do *some final install testing 
of the latest build of ECF, available in the p2 repo here [4]*.  If you 
find problems with the installation or testing, please *open major bugs 
right away*.

What's Next:  RSA 1.1/OSGi R6

For the past four months, I and others have been working on supporting 
RSA 1.1/OSGi R6, previously known as RFC 203.   This is an 
update/enhancement of the Remote Service Admin specification (1.0 -> 
1.1).  The work has been and will be done on a git branch named rfc1.1 
[5].  The work is nearly done.

OSGi Reference Implementation

ECF is currently under evaluation for becoming the OSGi R6 RS/RSA 
reference implementation.    What does the evaluation consist of? The 
technically most important thing is that ECF's impl passes the OSGi 
RS/RSA Compatibility Test suite (CT).   This is a set of junit tests 
that verify that any RS/RSA impl is behaving as specified. We currently 
run the entire OSGi R5 CT suite on our Jenkins builder, upon every 
relevant checkin, to test for regression.  When the R6 spec and CT are 
complete (that's not the case yet), we will setup our builder to run 
this test suite as well.  So being able to pass the R6 CT tests is a big 
part of the driver for completing the work started on the rfc1.1 branch.

There are other, non-technical criteria for candidate RI implementations 
also.  For example, using an acceptable open source license, having a 
clear understanding of the code provenance, having consistent builds, 
producing regular binary releases, making source code available, etc.   
Happily, as a mature open source project that participates in the EF 
annual simultaneous release (Luna this year), and having our own most 
excellent builder at [6], we easily satisfy these non-technical criteria 
as well without having to do extra/additional work.

To sum up:

1) Please install the latest build of ECF [4] and immediately open new 
bugs if problems are found
2) Over next few weeks, I'm moving to complete support for RSA 1.1, by 
completing work on the rfc1.1 branch and then when Luna quiet week 
arrives (week of June 16 [7])...merging rfc1.1 branch into master...for 
ECF 3.9 (RSA 1.1 support essentially).
3) If you are able/interested in getting involved in the work on RSA 1.1 
and/or the reference impl evaluation please let me know.   I would like 
to have assistance in performing this work...and the associated testing 
and releng/builder additions/changes.

Thanks!   It's going to be a very exciting summer and fall for ECF!

Scott

[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=430752
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=430752#c25
[3] http://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF
[4] 
http://build.ecf-project.org/repo/C-HEAD-filetransfer.p2.feature/lastSuccessful/
[5] http://git.eclipse.org/c/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git?h=rfc1.1
[6] https://build.ecf-project.org/jenkins/
[7] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Luna/Simultaneous_Release_Plan