[alf-dev] Comments on the Flash Demo

["Mike Milinkovich" <mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I watched the ALF Flash demo 
(http://www.eclipse.org/alf/ALF%20POC%20Demo.htm). Great stuff! Very 
compelling. I really enjoyed it, and have already pointed several people to 
it to learn more about the project.


I have a couple of questions and comments.

  1.. For some reason, I had been assuming that the integration engine was 
going to be based on a publish/subscribe model. But it doesn't appear that's 
the case. Can you point me to the right document I can read to understand 
how the action side of service flows are defined?

  2.. I am not sure I understand the meta-model for the data being passed 
when events fire. I would assume that this is the "secret sauce" for tool 
integration in ALF, but it's not really mentioned in the demo. Is this 
because it's still undefined?

  3.. With regards to the single sign-on, have you made a determination as 
to whether Higgins will meet your needs?

  4.. Just out of idle curiousity, has the project evaluated the BPEL engine 
that in the progress of migrating from TPTP to STP? The GPL license used by 
ActiveBPEL could definitely be an issue. (I really mean "could". I am not 
sure how the linking works in this case, so don't know what the GPL license 
semantics would be like in this scenario. But as a general statement, we 
attempt to avoid GPL code in Eclipse projects.)

  5.. A word of caution on samples and examples, just in case. As an open 
source community, we need to ship samples and examples that leverage open 
source runtimes. So at some point, you're going to have to think through an 
example that leverages open source code, rather than proprietary ones. I 
apologize if I'm stating the obvious or repeating what Bjorn has already 
said, but I don't want to make the mistake of not being explicit on the 
topic.