[alf-dev] Agenda and notes for today's ALF Architecture Team call

["Brian Carroll" <BCarroll@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Some notes in preparation for the ALF Architecture Team call today at 11AM PST

 

 

             Agenda/Notes for ALF Architecture Team meeting for Feb 2, 2006

 

1. Meeting Schedule:
  a. No ALF Arch call next week (Feb 9th 2006). Brian will be at the Eclipse Seminar series.
  b. [AN UPDATE FROM PREVIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTS:] No meeting the following week

     (Feb 16th 2006) due to likely conflict with public demo of the ALF POC scheduled to

     start 8AM PST on that day.
  c. The next ALF Arch call will be on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

  d. Call for volunteer to take minutes
 
2. Code and CVS
   a. The Eclipse Event Manager code used in the ALF POC has been checked in to Eclipse CVS.
     Because the code was developed outside the Eclipse CVS, we needed to submit an Eclipse
     Code Contribution Questionnaire and have the Eclipse legal department do a scan of the
     code.  The web forms implementation of the Contribution Questionnaire was a bit
     confusing and buggy, but we got through it and have communicated the issues to Eclipse.
     The Eclipse code review process that looks for IP violations and licensing issues
     proceeded very quickly, possibly due to the small volume of code (around 1800 LOC) and
     several internal reviews to ensure the code was as clean as possible.
     Note that the code should be built with libraries conforming to the Servlet 2.3 spec
     until we load test and can safely remove the SingleThreadModel marker interface (which
     has been deprecated in the Servlet 2.4 specification.)

 

   b. ALF designer tooling
      Tim and Manny Panis (developer of the Event Manager code) are preparing to check in

      simple programs that allows an administrator to design the configure ALF (e.g. the

     event-to-action mapping for  use by the ALF EventManager.)

 

   c. Everyone who participates in the POC should be preparing for contributing their POC product
      stubs to Eclipse CVS.

 

   d. Going forward, we will try to develop code within the Eclipse CVS wherever possible.
      We have gone through the Eclipse project learning curve. Not only will the early use
      of Eclipse be in keeping with the spirit of openness and community review

 

3. Recent and upcoming activities
   a. Last week Tim and I presented ALF to a group of future ALF users - other Serena development
      teams under Ali Kheirolomoom's group that are preparing products for ALF.  So at least
      at a high level, the ALF architecture is getting additional scrutiny from the developers
      who will be enabling tools to ALF.
   b. Eclipse Seminar Series - Next week I'll be on the road in San Diego (Feb 7th) and Dallas
      (Feb 9th - hence no ALF Arch meeting next week), as part of the Eclipse Seminar Series.
      The series is intended to introduce Eclipse to industry executives and encourage participation.
      I'm somewhere in the middle of the presenter lineup and will be talking about the problem
      of the dismal state of tool interoperability, how ALF addresses that problem, and encourage the
      participation by the attendees in ALF in a variety of ways.  Kevin Parker, our ALF
      Evangelist, will present at the other cities in the seminar series.

 

4. Procedural
   a. Use of Bugzilla
      Bugzilla is set up for use and has been tested.  I will be entering a couple of issues with
      the Event Manager that came up in discussions with teams enabling products to ALF.  The issues
      involve removing restrictions that would inhibit extensibility in the development of future
      ALF vocabularies and tool interfaces.
   b. Brian is working with our process and QA teams to document procedures (e.g. Use of bugzilla,

      code reviews, use of CVS, etc.).  These will be based-on the Eclipse process with minor enhancements.

   c. Minutes - I'm still catching up on getting these posted. Will spread out the load by asking for volunteers

       to take the minutes and get them posted quickly.
 

5. Architectural topics
   a. ALF Security for SSO
      Discussions by this team have raised the notion of using the Liberty Alliance when we come to
      implementing the ALF SSO.  Due to the similarity between WS-Trust and WS-Federation and the
      Liberty Alliance (and the use of the SAML protocol), I believe we can have a pluggable
      architecture to allow either the use of WS-Trust and WS-Federation and the Liberty Alliance
      (SAML Protocol) at least at the architectural level.  I am attempting to separate the
      architecture for ALF SSO from the implementation decisions, but at least at this point, I believe
      the ALF architecture can be sufficiently flexible to accommodate both camps.
      I am now targeting Feb 16ths (the day of the ALF POC) to have the ALF Architecture for SSO
      document available.
   b. ALF Vocabularies
      I apologize for this one, as I thought it would be posted by now.  The document had passed
      internal review but I decided to do a last review before posting it - enough time had elapsed
      since the time I wrote the document that I could perceive what could have been expressed more
      clearly.  My mistake.  I expect to have the document posted by the end of this week.
   c. Event Manager
      The POC has pointed out some interesting issues in the area of how ALF will maintain cross-tool
      identifiers.  We can discuss during the call and start thinking about approaches.

 

Brian Carroll
Serena Fellow
Serena
(ofc)  (503) 617-2436
(cell)  (503) 318-2017
bcarroll@xxxxxxxxxx 

 

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