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Re: [ecf-dev] file-based discovery

Hi Sebastian,

On 2/4/2011 2:10 AM, Sebastian Schmidt wrote:
Hi,

perhaps we might deprecate the old discovery mechanism in ECF 3.5 and
remove it in ECF 3.6. This would give consumers more time to migrate
their code.

Normally, I would say this is a fine/good idea, but there are several things that make this problematic:

1) Given the move to using RSA (underneath the ECF remote service support), it may be technically difficult (or impossible) to include both the old and the new/standards-based file-based discovery mechanisms. That is...at this moment, I'm not even sure how much work it would be to make the old xml-file-based discovery work with RSA (it might be a lot...for example the existing/old xml-file-based code doesn't even compile at the moment...because it's dependent upon some of the old RFC 119-based classes...which have been removed in favor of the RSA impl).

2) It may be very confusing for people to have *both* xml-file formats supported in one implementation (assuming 1 can be addressed). Because essentially they both do exactly the same thing (allow remote services to be discovered via an xml-file-based description of the remote service). One (the RSA endpoint description extender format) is an actual standard, while the old/existing format is based upon what was defined for RFC 119...and that RFC was discarded at the last minute).

3) It will a fair amount of effort to support the old format, and there are no resources that I know of for support (for example, I simply won't be able to do it, given my expected availability...and the last thing that I want is to be dinged at the project level over and over for not providing sufficient documentation and support).

So, I would say that if there is someone willing to provide resources to deal with 1, 2, and 3 (e.g. to change the existing code to work with RSA, to document and support the old format...in combination with the new format), then we could do this strategy.

But lacking contributions to make this happen, I don't see how it's going to be possible...for reasons detailed above.

So...we'll put it to folks: If you want the old format supported for ECF 3.5, then please contribute the resources to address the three items above. Otherwise, I don't see any other way than to support the new RSA/OSGi standard format exclusively.

Scott



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