Technology Projects Workshop

Overview

(email from Bjorn)

Technology Committers, A number of Technology projects (ALF, Buckminster, Corona, ECF, Kepler) have decided to have a face-to-face meeting at the Hyatt Burlingame in the afternoon of January 24th (after the Council meetings). As with all things Eclipse, any and all committers are welcome to attend, but please RSVP.

Expected participants: developers in the application lifecycle and collaboration spaces. This is a technical, developer-centric, meeting.

Goal: identify areas where the projects can work together to accelerate the delivery of a cohesive Eclipse solution in this space. In other words, how can the projects work together (technically) and avoid duplication.

Presentation: each participant should expect to start the day with a brief (and technical) description of:

• Their project's goals and objects
• Technology the project has to offer in this space
• Common pieces required for a solution
• Candidates for consolidation of technology
• Existing overlaps of technology with other Eclipse projects
• Existing overlaps of technology with third-party (Apache?) open source projects
• Suggestion for next practical steps we should take

RSVP

Please add your name to the following list to RSVP for the Technology Projects Workshop:

• Dennis O'Flynn, Corona Project Lead
• Don Ebright, Corona Architect
• Paul Styles, Corona Product Manager
• Scott Lewis, ECF Project Lead
• Brian Carroll, ALF Project Lead
• Tim Buss, ALF
• Eishay Smith, OHF
• Craig Laverone, Aperi
• Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Technology PMC Lead
• Philip Dodds, Kepler
• Henrik Lindberg, Buckminster Project, Cloudsmith - via phone
• Thomas Hallgren, Buckminster Project, Cloudsmith - via phone

Technology Projects

Please add a short outline of the presentation you plan to bring to the workshop so that we can pre-review each other's work and thus get the short afternoon started more quickly.

Buckminster

Buckminster’s objective is to leverage and extend the Eclipse platform to make mixed-component development as efficient as plug-in development. The basic approach is to introduce a project-agnostic way of describing a development project’s component structure and dependencies, and to provide a mechanism for materializing source and binary artifacts for a project of any degree of complexity.

Buckminster capabilities:

• Complex (recursive) dependency resolution
• Uniform component dependency format - levaraging existing meta data
• Intelligent retrieval mechanisms - from high variability to frozen configurations
• Flexible project workspace binding
• Actions (run builds etc.)
• Headless small footprint packaging

The full presentation is here (in pdf format).

Corona

Corona is the Tools Services Framework. Its goal is to enable tools and people to interact with each other in a common collaboration context. Corona's framework is based upon the following technologies:

• ContextContainer - common context for collaboration within a distributed workgroup environment
  • RepositoryDescriptor - Defines a reference to a repository that is associated with the ContextContainer
  • Events - Distributed event model for ContextContainer notifications
• Server Side Eclipse - Eclipse based server-side environment to manage Corona's workgroup environment
  • Web services - an OSGi-based SOA component framework for server-side Eclipse plug-in deployment
  • Management - manageability of component and resources via WSDM

The Corona presentation is [1]

Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF)

[ECF] is a set of Equinox-based open APIs for asynchronous point-to-point or group messaging. The APIs are abstracted from the underlying protocol, which allows multiple protocols and services to be supported.

APIs Currently Available

• Service Discovery
• Datashare
• File Transfer
• Remote OSGI Services
• Presence, IM, and Chat
• Object Replication
• Others Being Worked On (e.g. VOIP Call setup/signalling API)

ECF bundles may be used for messaging-enabling server, eRCP, RCP, or Eclipse-based tools and applications.

Kepler

[Kepler] is a Community-Oriented Development Platform that will provide technologies and tooling to Eclipse that enables communities to manage and coordinate development in a distributed and highly interdependent manner. It is the intention of the Kepler project to provide abstraction on leading tools provided today in a rich environment.

Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF)

[OHF] is a framework providing tools, data structures, protocol stack, and frameworks to the Healthcare vertical. Among others, OHF deals with Public Health, Terminology, HL7 messaging, IHE profiles (XDS, PIX, PDQ, ATNA), security, devices, and more.

ALF

The ALF presentation is [2]