| Re: [ecf-dev] GSoc 2015 |
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Hi Osanda,
On 3/9/2015 9:50 AM, Osanda Wedamulla wrote:
There are several other tutorials listed here under the OSGi Remote Services section: https://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF
The current 'theme' for ECF is the addition of Eclipse-based tooling support for ECF's implementation of Remote Services. I have intended to add to the GSOC 2015 page with some ideas for this, but have not had the opportunity to do so. I will try to do this in the the coming week. What does 'tooling support for ECF's implementation of Remote Services' mean? For those of us that have designed, implemented, debugged, tested, packaged and deployed remote services in enterprise class product contexts, it's quite clear that there needs to be additional tooling (beyond current PDE) for designing, defining, implementing, debugging, and working with Remote Services. Actually I would take this one step further and say that the Eclipse-based tooling for working with *local* OSGi services (in addition to remote) could use a significant upgrade beyond what PDE provides as well. And since Remote Services are just local OSGi services that are distributed across a network, much of the tooling will/should be usable for working with local *and* remote services. Where are we with the work on this theme? First, we have a tracking bug/enhancement to communicate about work in this area [1]. I would recommend that any prospective GSOC students add themselves to the cc list for at least this bug (and any dependent bugs), and post and discuss with committers their interests and ideas...as comments on this bug, comments on the dependent bugs and/or new/additional dependent bugs. Second, there are several previous discussion threads on this mailing list about tooling support for remote services [2] that you should probably read. There are quite a lot of ideas articulated in these discussions...certainly far more than we can actually address with current project resources. Third, work was done last summer by Sakith on adding remote service project templates, and this work is described here [3]. The work by Sakith was terrific, but we have not yet followed through on getting his work into a proper ECF release (some additions, generalizations, were/are needed, and undertaken to some degree by Sakith and committer Wim Jongman, so I'm not certain exactly what state this work is currently in). Fourth, Wim Jongman has been working some on the dependent bugs for [1], and so he should probably comment/coordinate on where things are with that work. Fifth, I've been defining and implementing new 'remote management' services [4]. This may not immediately seem like the same thing as remote services tooling, but in fact it is...because if you think of adding (for example) Eclipse views that show the state of remote services (e.g. whether they've been discovered, where they came from, what state the underlying ECF container is in, whether or not they expose an async API, etc), such views will most certainly need to get this information from somewhere...and these remote management services can/will provide such information about any OSGI framework. So these management APIs will/should be used by the tooling for *runtime* introspection, presentation in Eclipse (e.g. via Eclipse views), and even management/manipulation (e.g. giving the means to manually export and/or import a remote service). Think of the usefulness of such a set of views for testing and debugging remote services, for example. Sixth, what is described in [1-4] is not the 'end of the story' WRT tooling support for remote services. There are/should be other additional ideas, and you as a GSOC student (and/or anyone else) is most welcome to provide and pursue your own ideas about what kind of enhancements could be made. The Remote Services work is still quite young, with much potential IMHO (especially for Internet of Things), and so others might very well have some great ideas for making the creation/definition/use of Remote Services easier and more accessible. [1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=454609 [2] https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/ecf-dev/msg07122.html https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/ecf-dev/msg03510.html [3] https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/ecf-dev/msg07256.html [4] https://github.com/ECF/OSGIRemoteManagement Work described on this thread: https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/ecf-dev/msg07528.html [5] http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/presentations/ese2014/How%20to%20Cook%20an%20Egg%20with%20the%20Eclipse%20Communication%20Framework.pdf https://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF_Remote_Services_for_Raspberry_Pi_GPIO
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