[ecf-dev] Luna quiet week

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

Luna M4 is being finalized as we speak...and the Luna quiet week is next 
week [1], which means it's now time to discuss ECF 3.9.0 :).

ECF 3.9.0 will require some coordination for reasons presented below, 
and so I would like to restart our bi-weekly conference calls.   I 
propose that we have as short-as-possible conference call every two 
weeks, and have it at this time:

Monday, 9:30 am pacific time, 6:30pm CEST

Further, I propose that we have the first meeting this coming Monday, 
June 16 and plan on using a Google hangout.

If this time and day doesn't work for you, and you wish to attend over 
the next couple of months, please propose a better day and time for you 
and we'll work something out.

Now...about the reason for conference calls.  There are several 
immediately pressing things for ECF:

1) ECF is currently under consideration/evaluation as the *reference 
implementation for OSGi R6 Remote Services/Remote Service Admin 
standards.  This is/would be very valuable for the project wrt 
visibility, publicity, and commercial adoption.   It would also be a 
great and well-deserved validation of all the hard work that has gone 
into ECF's RS/RSA impl over the past couple of years since RS/RSA spec 
has appeared.

What I mean exactly by 'under consideration' is that the OSGi Enterprise 
Experts Group (of which I and ECF committer Jan Rellermeyer are members) 
has received from me answers to the OSGi Alliance 'criteria for 
reference implementation selection'.  I submitted ECF's answers to the 
EEG prior to the Wed, May 28 meeting.   The response so far has been 
very good, as ECF has a *very* strong track record WRT legal criteria 
(licensing, provenance, etc) as well as technical criteria (continuous 
builds/integration, reliability, consistent releases over many years, 
modular and small impl, open and well-structured API/extensibility, etc).

2) In support of 1, I have completed all the necessary code changes for 
the R6-compliant impl of RS/RSA.  This work has been proceeding on a 
branch called 'rfc1.1' [2].   My expectation and desire is to merge all 
of this work into master *next week* (during Luna quiet week), and 
include it into ECF 3.9.0 in parallel with the release of the RS/RSA R6 
specifications.  This should be very straightforward to actually do, 
since I've been regularly merging changes to master (in prep for Luna) 
into rfc1.1

3) Sakith Indula is working on Remote Services tooling for his Google 
Summer of Code project.   He is currently focusing on adding PDE 
templates for remote services (e.g. a time service template, other new 
remote service interfaces).   This is/will be only the beginning of ECF 
efforts in improved tooling for Remote Services creation, testing, 
debugging, deployment...i.e. the 'whole enchilada' for remote services 
development and usage.   e.g. remote services annotations, a 'remote 
service browser' (for testing/debugging/discovering), and better support 
for creation of remote services for small devices (i.e. Internet of Things).

For these three reasons...and many others that I'm either forgetting or 
choosing not to list here, I think we should have bi-weekly ECF meetings 
for the next few weeks.

Thanks...and hopefully see you on Monday, 16 at 9:30am pacific time.  
Please let me know if you will attend, and the gmail address I should 
use for inviting you to the hangout.

Thanks,

Scott

[1] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Luna/Simultaneous_Release_Plan
[2] http://git.eclipse.org/c/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git?h=rfc1.1