[soa-iwg] ECF and SOA initiative

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings SOAers,

My apologies in advance for not being totally aware of all the archival 
discussion on this list, as when I went to read the archive at 
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/soa-iwg/ I got 'Not Found'.  
Perhaps it's just not set up yet or there just is no archive at this point.

First, I would hope that this SOA initiative would both use the existing 
work from, as well as involve the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) 
project team:  http://www.eclipse.org/ecf

The main reason I think this is appropriate that we are/have been doing 
quite a lot already with 1) distributed services (we are already 
providing both the API and the implementation of OSGi EE RFC 119 aka 
Distributed OSGi); 2) network service discovery; 3) p2/server 
provisioning; 4) messaging-based services (e.g. JMS), and more 
recently/currently, REST (i.e. see 
http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2009/07/29/rest-the-osgi-way/).  All of 
these efforts are service-oriented architecture-based, with an emphasis 
on OSGi/Equinox-based services (although not limited to OSGi-only in any 
sense).

Hopefully this work (and the work we are doing and planning to do going 
forward) would make sense for the SOA Initiative.  I think we can/could 
both provide Equinox-based infrastructure, as well as benefit from what 
the initiative does.

Second, another thought/comment about the SOA initiative proposal is 
that I disagree with the requirements for steering committee membership:

Steering Committee Members are required to:

   * Be Strategic or Enterprise member of the Eclipse Foundation
   * Appoint at least 3 developers to implement requirements agreed in
     the Industry Working Group to creating the Eclipse SOA platform...

i.e. why is it necessary for the steering committee members be Strategic 
or Enterprise members of the Eclipse Foundation?  This effectively 
limits steering committee membership to relatively large corporations.

Best,

Scott