[eclipse.org-membership-at-large] Technology Project Declaration: Applic

[Bjorn Freeman-Benson <bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

As per the Eclipse Development Process, we are notifying the Eclipse 
Membership-at-Large of the intent of Serena to propose the ALMIFF 
project as part of the Technology PMC.

A brief description of the project is below. A project proposal will be 
posted on http://www.eclipse.org/ in a week or so.

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Project Declaration for "Application Lifecycle Management Integration 
and Interoperability Framework (ALMIIF)"

Currently, the application lifecycle is supported by numerous 
heterogeneous, multi-vendor applications which are integrated in a 
point-to-point manner.  Point-to-point integrations are adequate only 
for small numbers of integration endpoints and typically create more 
complexity in developing and managing tools than they solves.  Given the 
myriad of products, tools, and services that are typically integrated to 
manage an application change from its inception to fulfillment, the 
number of endpoints inevitably grows.  To effectively manage the 
application change across the lifecycle, these various product silos and 
tools need to be integrated. 

The ALMIIF project will address the integration and interoperability of 
tools and services covering the overall process of developing 
information systems through a multi-step process from investigation of 
initial requirements through analysis, design, implementation and 
maintenance. ALMIIF will introduce an integrated design-time meta-model 
and an integrated runtime. The design-time meta-model represents an 
XML-based vocabulary that describes the application change including its 
business process, activity, user interface, business rules and policy, 
and connection to backend system. The integrated runtime framework 
consists of four major areas: Service Registry, Service Engine, 
Presentation Engine, and Virtual Repository.