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[stp-pmc] Project proposal: Policy Development Kit
Title: Project proposal: Policy Development Kit
Dear all,

please find attached the proposal for a new subproject in STP: Policy Development Kit. I hope the document is self-explanatory, but of course I’ll be available for questions and I’m looking forward to your feedback.

Best regards

    Jerry Preissler


Gerald Preissler
Tel.:     +49 228-182 19112
Fax:     +49 228-182 19099
gerald.preissler@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:gerald.preissler@xxxxxxxxx>
SOPERA GmbH - Open Source SOA
www.sopera.de <http://www.sopera.de/>
 
SOPERA GmbH · Geschäftsführer:
Dr. Ricco Deutscher, Harald Weimer, Peter Spiegel
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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body><h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>Policy Development Kit  is a proposed sub-project under the top level project <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/"; target="_blank">Eclipse SOA Tools Platform (STP)</a>. The proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. You are invited to comment on and join the project. Please send all feedback to the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.stp"; target="_blank">Eclipse STP newsgroup</a> until a proper newsgroup is established.</p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>
Policies provide a means to describe just about any property that can be applied to an entity. Corresponding standards, such as the WS-Policy family of standards published by the W3C, have been established to provide a machine-readable, standardized format to capture policies and apply them to selected entities. These standards are being used especially in the SOA context to capture non-functional aspects of services.
</p>
<p>
Currently, the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/"; target="_blank">STP project</a> contains a component named <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/policy/"; target="_blank">STP Policy Editor</a>. This component provides a GUI-based editor to create and edit XML documents that conform the the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/policy/"; target="_blank">WS-Policy</a> standard published by the <a href="http://www.w3.org"; target="_blank">W3C</a>.
</p>
<p>The aim of this proposal is to initiate a sub-project of <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/"; target="_blank">STP project</a> that builds on the current <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/policy/"; target="_blank">STP Policy Editor</a> component to provide a more comprehensive toolkit for policy handling.
</p>
<h2>Description</h2>
<p>The charter of the STP Policy Development Kit sub-project is the creation of extensible tools and exemplar implementations such as editors, connectors, repositories, libraries, storage, validation, management, manipulation and extraction related to policies. Of particular interest are the official WS-Policy standardized formats and assertions that conform to these standards. Beyond WS-Policy, non-XML based policy expressions such as SCA Policy assertions are also of interest for the project.</p>
<p>A secondary goal is to further re-use within the eclipse ecosystem by identifing aspects within the policy editor that could be of general interest to other eclipse projects and to provide them as seperate bundles.</p>
<p>
We also aim to link the tools provided by the STP Policy Development Kit with other Eclipse tools that could apply WS-Policy within their problem domain, such as the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/sca/"; target="_blank">STP SCA tools</a>. STP Policy Editor will also interact with the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/im/index.php"; target="_blank">STP Intermediate Model</a> component.
</p>
<h2>Project Scope</h2>
The Policy Development Kit will focus on providing advanced, user-friendly and extensible tools to
<ul>
 <li>specify concrete policy languages that describe policies in a user-defined problem domain and</li>
 <li>create, edit, manipulate and store policy documents that conform to these policy languages</li>
 <li>enable team-based functionality for sharing, versioning, comparing these policy documents</li>
</ul>
Internal components that provide generic functionality (i.e., that do not only apply to editing policies) will be provided as seperate bundles to foster re-use. Where appropriate an integration with other projects such as the STP intermediate model, SCA tools and BPMN modeler.
<h2>Proposed Components</h2>
<ul>
  <li>Policy structure editor - the top-level editor component that is responsible for instantiating policy documents and display and manipulate their high-level structure</li>
  <li>XEF - an extensible framework for the dynamic creation of editors from annotated XML Schema. This will be used to provide a generic editor for user-defined policy assertion types</li>
  <li>Validation framework - an extensible framework to integrate validation mechanisms for arbitrary document types</li>
</ul>
<h2>Relationship with other Eclipse projects</h2>
The Policy Editor sub-project will be build on top of the Eclipse Platform and will have relationships with other Eclipse projects.
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/"; target="_blank">STP</a>
  The Policy Editor will aim to supply policy editing capabilities to any STP sub-project and component that requires this capability. At the least, this would cover
  <ul>
    <li> <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/im/"; target="_blank">Intermediate Model</a></li>
    <li> <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/bpmn-modeler/"; target="_blank"></a>BPMN Modeler</li>
    <li> <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/sca"; target="_blank">SCA tools</a></li>
  </ul></li>
  <li> <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/emf"; target="_blank"> EMF</a>-based model will be used to create a model to represent WS-Policy documents for processing within the Policy Editor and for interoperability with other EMF-based components.</li>
<li> <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/wtp";> Web Tools Platform project</a> currently provides some internal code. In addition the Policy Editor's look & feel is modelled after the WTP WSDL editor.</li>
</ul>
Other projects will be added to this list when required.
<h2>Organization</h2>
We propose that this sub-project will take place under the top level project <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/"; target="_blank">STP</a>.
<h2>Proposed initial committers</h2>
The initial project team will consist of the current committers to the existing STP Policy Editor component:
<ul>
  <li>Gerald Preissler (leader) - <a href="http://www.sopera.com"; target="_blank">SOPERA</a> - STP Policy Editor component committer</li>
  <li>David Bosschaert - <a href="http://www.progress.com"; >Progress Software</a> - STP Policy Editor component committer, initial contributor of the XEF component</li>
  <li>Andrei Shakirin - <a href="http://www.sopera.com"; target="_blank">SOPERA</a> - STP Policy Editor component committer</li>
  <li>Alexey Markevich - <a href="http://www.sopera.com"; target="_blank">SOPERA</a> - STP Policy Editor component committer</li>
  <li>Alexandr Tselesh - <a href="http://www.sopera.com"; target="_blank">SOPERA</a> - STP Policy Editor component committer</li>
  <li>Oisin Hurley  - <a href="http://www.progress.com"; >Progress Software</a> - STP lead</li>
</ul>
We also propose to add the following person to the list of committers:
<ul>
  <li>Renat Zubairov - <a href="http://www.sopera.com"; target="_blank">SOPERA</a> - will be proposed as a new committer. He has already intiated the Policy Editor GUI walkthrough and will work on the refactoring of the user interface.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Code Contributions</h2>
The initial code contribution will consist of the following components:
<ul>
 <li>The XEF component as currently present in the STP Policy Editor</li>
 <li>The Policy Structure Editor as currently present in the STP Policy editor</li>
 <li>The Validation Framework as proposed by SOPERA (currently undergoing IP compliance processing)</li>
</ul>

<h2>Interested Parties</h2>
<a href="http://www.obeo.fr/";>OBEO<a><br/>
<a href="http://www.progress.com/";>Progress Software<a><br/>
<a href="http://ebmwebsourcing.com/";>EBM WebSourcing<a><br/>
<h2>Tentative Plan</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Policy structure editor</em> - rework of the user interface look and feel and better integration of the XEF editor as outlined during the GUI walkthrough</li>
<li><em> XEF </em> - 
Architectural extensions to add greater control over the construction of editors and processing of editor input, especially in the area of user-defined policy assertions. Exemplars for these extensions. Annotated schema and editors for standardized WS-Policy formats, for example WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-SecurityPolicy.
</li>
<li><em>EMF-based model</em> to replace the current bespoke policy implementation. Shall support the current version of the WS-Policy standard and all defined policy operations.</li>
<li>
 <em>Capabilities</em> -
New wizards for the creation of policy documents using XEF, policy category in the wizards, policy preferences, documentation ekcetera
</li>
<li><em>Policy operation support</em> - provide integrated support for the policy operations defined in WS-Policy</li>
<li><em>
 Policy Team APIs</em> - 
For interaction with a policy repository, check in, check out, browse. How would this work...?
</li>
</ul>
tbd</body></html>

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