[ecf-dev] ECF 3.5

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

It's time to do some community planning for ECF 3.5 and beyond.  In this 
email, I'm going to focus on ECF 3.5 specifically...and in a second 
planning email I will discuss what we're going to do for the Indigo 
simultaneous release.

When:  ECF 3.5 has been previously planned for 'late Feb 2011'.  The 
desire here is to have the ECF 3.5 release prior to EclipseCon 2011 (in 
early March).

What:  This is the main question for this email.  We have to (soon) 
decide what will go into ECF 3.5.

Other than bug fixes (of which there have been a good amount since 3.4), 
the only thing that I know for sure that is going into ECF 3.5 is the 
OSGi 4.2 Remote Service Admin spec implementation that I've been doing 
since ECF 3.4.  This implementation is now very close to complete, and 
you can get technical details and/or participate in the remaining 
finishing/testing work via this enhancement [1].   See below for some 
initial words describing the RSA implementation.

I'm sure there are other ECF committers and/or contributors that have 
work that they've been doing that could potentially be in ECF 3.5 as 
well.  So I make the following request of *all ECF committers, 
contributors, and community members*:

Action request:  If you have something that you have been working on, 
that can/could be in ECF 3.5, please take a few moments to create a 
posting to this mailing list (in response to this email) describing that 
work, and detailing what/where it is in development and what (to your 
own understanding) needs to take place in order for it to be included 
in/added to ECF 3.5.

Note that the contribution does *not* have to be a code contribution, as 
contributions to the ECF documentation project [3] can/would also be 
great and very welcome additions/contributions to ECF.  Such 
contributions are *very important*.  So if you have/could make a 
documentation, and/or examples contribution (whether you are a committer 
or not), please respond to this email with that information, so that I 
and the rest of the community can plan for that.

Thanksinadvance for your usage, participation, and continued support of ECF,

Scott


[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=324215
[2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF/Asynchronous_Remote_Services
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=329124


Short description of ECF's OSGi 4.2 RSA Standard Implementation

I think RSA will be a very nice addition for ECF consumers...not only 
because it's been explicitly requested by some in the community, but 
also because ECF's modularity (i.e. separation of discovery and remote 
service APIs...allowing multiple, transport specific providers to be 
mixed and matched for remote service discovery (e.g. zookeeper, 
zeroconf, slp, xml-file-based,  custom), and the distribution (rosgi, 
ecf generic, jms, xmpp, javagroups,  as well as our support of 
asynchronous/non-blocking messaging for remote procedure call (see [2]), 
makes ECF's implementation of this OSGi standard the most open. 
extensible and interoperable implementation available...bug also makes 
it the most functional that I know of for creating scalable enterprise 
remote services using industry standards.

I'll be making a number of postings over the coming months clarifying 
what RSA is, and how ECF's implementation provides added value above and 
beyond existing commercial and/or other implementations.

If people have questions about the RSA spec, and/or ECF's 
implementation, please ask them on either the rsa enhancement request 
[1], and/or via this mailing list.