Skalli/Proposal

This proposal is currently in draft status

Introduction

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process document) and is written to declare the intent and scope of the proposed Skalli project. This proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. If you have any comments on the project or want to join the project please send your feedback to <url> 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, namely, the Skalli Project. Section Initial Contributions 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 Skalli 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.

Skalli in Norse mythology a wolf, companion of Odin, that chases the chariot of the sun goddess Sol 
through the sky every day and therefore causing her to speed up and hurry. During a solar eclipse 
he approaches the sun dangerously closely and almost succeeds.

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.

This project is poposed as an incubator project under the Eclipse Technology Project.

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.

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.

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

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 votings) 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.

Relationship with other Eclipse projects

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 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 the future.

Committers

• 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

Mentors

• Chris Aniszczyk (Red Hat)
• Bernd Kolb (SAP)

Interested Parties

Companies and individuals likewise are encouraged to express their interest into this project by putting your name and affiliation on the list below.

• Chris Aniszczyk (Red Hat)
• Jochen Hiller (Deutsche Telekom AG)