Skip to main content

Skalli

Skalli

The Skalli project is a proposed open source incubator project under the Eclipse Technology Project.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback to the Eclipse Proposals Forum.

This proposal is structured as follows. Section Background gives the motivation of the project and provides some background information about the origins of the proposed project. Section Initial Contribution describes the current state of the project and the initial contributions that will be made. Section Scope outlines the initial set of tools and platforms this project aims to deliver to its users; Description gives little more details on the intermediate goals. Section Related Eclipse Projects describes potential future connections between current eclipse.org projects and the proposed project as well as likely collaborations. The remaining sections (Committers, Mentors, Interested Parties) describe what their names suggest.

Background

The tentative name of the project is Skalli which comes from Norse mythology.

In Norse mythology, Skalli is a wolf that pursues the chariot 
of the sun goddess Sol across the skies every day. 
He has a twin brother Hati that pursues Máni, the moon.

Project management in open source varies from community to community. There are no good open source solutions out there that help manage your project and the Eclipse community has grown out of the current project management infrastructure at eclipse.org. The Skalli project aims at closing this gap.

Scope

One of the major goals of this project is to make a new generation project management tool accessible and usable by the Eclipse community and other open source projects.

Thereby Skalli forms the central entry point to all projects and creates transparency over the existing projects. It leverages search technologies and social network mechanisms in order to structure and find them.

This project however does not aim at replacing existing tools like wiki, bugtracker and source code management system. It merely links to them and integrates their data and services as far as needed in order to let users - and through a REST API also other tools - gain an overview on each project's state and locate its resources.

Description

The goal of the project is to build an extensible system for organizing projects.

This includes support for creation of new projects and all the little processes (e.g. committer election) needed within the lifecycle of a project. Additionally, maintenance of project data must be simple. Committers should be enabled to request additional infrastructure according to the rules of the community in a seamless way. This should be realized by offering self-services within Skalli as much as feasible and integrating them with the corresponding community infrastructure.

Existing projects can be browsed and searched for, so users can find what they are looking for easily. Project details like source code location, bugtracker and quality metrics can be maintained by the corresponding committers, so that everyone is able to locate them instantly. Social media features like tagging and recommending projects help guiding users to the projects they are looking for.

Technically, the flexibility and extensibility is achieved by leveraging the mechanisms provided by OSGi. So modules introducing new UI building blocks or connections to additional services can be added as required.

The data about projects maintained within Skalli is also available via a REST API. This enables an ecosystem of loosely coupled tools that can use this data to provide additional services (e.g. quality reporting).

The short-term target is to reflect project related workflows (e.g. committer election and other voting) as well as the integration into major development infrastructure tools like Hudson, Git and Gerrit. By doing that, self-services can be provided to the teams that will reduce the administrative overhead of running a development infrastructure.

The project so far does not yet have strong relationships to existing Eclipse projects. It does however run on Eclipse Virgo and uses the Eclipse preference store.

Furthermore, once the foundation is laid and the project matures, the goal is to provide a suitable replacement for the current eclipse.org foundation portal in alignment with the Phoenix project.

The EMF toolset and EclipseLink could also be useful for this project and will potentially be used in future.

Initial Contribution

The Skalli project will be seeded with an initial contribution coming from SAP. It contains the basic set of features that already can be used productively and provides the foundation for integration of additional services and processes.

The contribution already includes project maintenance and data validation, searching for projects and contained components, a REST API for data retrieval. It runs on the Eclipse Virgo server. For the web interface, it currently uses JSP and Vaadin as UI technologies.

Committers

The following individuals are proposed as initial committers to the project:

Simon Kaufmann, SAP (Project Lead)
Matthias Sohn, SAP (Project Lead)
Chris Aniszczyk, Red Hat
Michael Ochmann, SAP
Jürgen Schneider, SAP
Jochen Hiller, Deutsche Telekom AG
Bernd Kolb, SAP

We welcome additional committers and contributions.

Mentors

The following Architecture Council members will mentor this project:

Interested Parties

The following individuals, organisations, companies and projects have expressed interest in this project:

Changes to this Document

17-December-2010 Initial Version
07-February-2011 Updated Interested Parties

Back to the top