I've been experimenting with using a graph to
understand the relationships between the projects, I started
capturing the relationships between the EE4J projects and
specifications and came up with the attached image.
The process of building this was a useful exercise for me
to get a little more familiar with the projects.
It's incomplete. Specs, projects, and relationships are
missing. I'm presenting this here as a proof of concept.
Dotted boxes represent specifications. Round rectangle
nodes are projects that maintain the specifications (e.g Eclipse
Project for Stable Jakarta EE Specifications "maintains"
a bunch of different specifications). Round rectangle nodes
with thick lines are are projects that implement
specifications (or otherwise implement stuff, like Eclipse
Grizzly).
This may be better represented as UML, but I decided to
go with a simple digraph for now.
I'm using Graphviz/dot, and have done nothing to try and
influence the layout.
I may be trying to accomplish too much with a single
diagram.
It may be more useful to capture these relationships with
some kind of more general metadata. I decided to just use
Graphviz notation to capture the relationships for now since
I could do so quickly. We can maybe convert this to a
different format later if we decide that it makes sense.
Does this (or something like this) seem useful?
If it seems useful, I'll put the dot file into our
repository so that I can accept pull requests :-)
Wayne
--
Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects
The Eclipse Foundation
