[ecf-dev] ECF Luna planning

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

Here's what I'm planning for ECF for our Luna release (i.e. after ECF 
3.8.0).   This is partially to let everyone know what's going 
on/planned, and partially to solicit help/assistance from committers 
and/or contributors (i.e. you don't have to be a committer to get 
directly involved with these efforts).

The changes/updates/etc are somewhat 'invisible' so I wanted to make 
them more visible.  There's actually a lot happening.

If you would like to get involved with any of these efforts please do 
so...by adding yourself to the associated bug, sending a note in 
response to this posting, and/or contacting me directly at slewis at 
composent.com.  Everyone should be aware though that since we are a 
mature EF project, the deadline for getting the new things below into 
ECF Luna is ~end of April (i.e. before Luna release freezes).

1) Updating our implementation of OSGi Remote Services/Remote Service 
Admin for OSGi R6.   For ~ 3 months now, I have been consistently 
updating our RS/RSA implementation based upon the OSGI RFC 203, on the 
git branch given in the bug [1] (and depends on). For your information, 
it's quite likely that nearly all of what's currently in RFC 203 will 
likely be in the R6 specification.   R6 is not at all finalized yet, 
however, so all of our work is proceeding on an ECF branch [1a], which 
will be merged in to master when R6 specification is complete and 
approved.  The timing and final content of the approval is not clearly 
known, however, so I'm not sure whether we will be able to do this merge 
before Luna release or not (my guess right now is that it will have to 
be a post-Luna maintenance release rather than merged/released in time 
for Luna). I'm the committer lead for this work.

2) Changes to ECF Discovery [2] and [2a].   [2] is work to make the 
RS/RSA usage of ECF discovery providers fully dynamic.  Markus K has 
been working on this and is part-way finished (is my understanding).   
It will need to be coordinated with the work from 1...since the RSA 1.1 
changes imply some additions/changes to discovery (addition of endpoint 
description update).  Markus K is the committer lead for this work.   
[2a] is about updating the zookeeper provider to use a more recent 
version of Apache Zookeeper.   Wim is the ECF committer lead for this work.

3) New distribution providers [3] and [3a].   [3] is websockets, and 
[3a] is for vert.x.   Both of these would/will be great examples of 
using ECF's provider architecture to allow the easy creation of custom 
RS/RSA distribution providers.  It would also be great if we can/could 
use these technical efforts to develop more tutorials for building and 
using custom providers (like our MQTT provider)...in addition to the 
[3b] tutorial.   I am the lead committer for this work, although I would 
welcome others willing to take the lead on these additions.

4) RS/RSA integration with Python [4] [4a].  [4] is work that Thomas 
Calmant has largely already done, and [4a] is work with Thomas as well 
as the OpenReplica team to integrate Python-based remote service 
consumers and hosts via ECF Remote Services.

5) Use of Java8 for asynchronous remote services.   As many of you know, 
java8 has some new features that are very interesting/useful from a 
remote services perspective...see [5] for example.  I intend to get this 
work into Luna...as well as a new wiki-based tutorial demonstrating via 
our example async time service code described in the blog...which is now 
checked in, BTW [5a]).   This is really exciting, IMHO, because it's 
right at the intersection between remote services...which have a strong 
need for asynchronous/non-blocking semantics...the java8 
async/concurrency/functional programming features...and ECF's ability to 
easily and efficiently support async proxies...through our provider 
architecture, underlying event-driven structure, and existing support 
for async proxies [5b].

6) Possible GSOC 2014 projects.   One request:  Sakith...who I believe 
submitted a proposal for GSOC 2014 for an ECF project...please do two 
things:
a) provide the URL/link of your proposal here on this list
b) please contact me via email at slewis at composent.com about mentoring

7) Make the use of Equinox extension registry optional [7].   In some 
runtime situations it would be helpful to not require the presence of 
the equinox extension registry.  Work on making this happen has been 
underway on a separate git branch for some time now...see [7]...and it 
will make it into ECF Luna.

8) More RS/RSA documentation additions.   As mentioned above, it would 
be great to get new tutorials for creating distribution providers, using 
java8/completable future for async proxies, use of ECF with Karaf, 
etc.   There's now a lot more at [8], but there's much more to be done.

9) Address as many existing bugs as possible [9].

10) Do all the required Luna releng/IP/EF stuff.

Thanks.  If any questions, comments, suggestions...and/or things that I 
missed above that are going on...please let all know.

Scott

[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=424304
[1a] http://git.eclipse.org/c/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git?h=rfc1.1

[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=424059
[2a] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=378350

[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=426186
[3a] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=430221
[3b] 
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Tutorial:_Creating_a_RESTful_Remote_Service_Provider

[4] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=424262
[4a] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=425817 
http://openreplica.org

[5] 
http://eclipseecf.blogspot.com/2014/03/completablefuture-for-osgi-remote.html
[5a] 
http://git.eclipse.org/c/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git/tree/providers/bundles/org.eclipse.ecf.provider.remoteservice.java8
http://git.eclipse.org/c/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git/tree/examples/bundles/com.mycorp.examples.timeservice.consumer.ds.async
[5b] https://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF/Asynchronous_Remote_Services

[7] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=421569

[8] https://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF#OSGi_Remote_Services

[9] 
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&classification=RT&list_id=8699254&product=ECF&query_format=advanced