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RE: [higgins-dev] Context Provider vs. Context Factory 
Tom Doman wrote:
> 
> Ok, after rehashing all of this with Jim, I believe I've discovered part
> of the source of my confusion.  Some of what's on the wiki and what's in
> the proposed interfaces seems to conflict.
> 
> Context Provider
> This is supposed to be a conceptual term that describes what I'd call
> the Context Factory, Contexts, and their implementation together with
> the other lower level interfaces such as Digital Subject, Attribute,
> MetaData, etc.  Is this correct?  

Yes. Mostly (see below).

> This is what I understand from the
> wiki.  If so, why is there a IContextProvider interface?  Is the
> IContextProvider interface really the Context Factory?  If so, why is it
> not called IContextFactory?

Greg can perhaps answer better. But my understanding is that we are
struggling with whether or not there is a need to make the IContextFactory
and IContextProvider distinction. 

In the original code (M0.4) there was only IContextFactory and a Context
Provider was just the name we used for the Eclipse plug-in containing all
the code. The wiki documents both this M0.4 design and a new M0.5 strawman
are described here: 
http://spwiki.editme.com/ContextProviderRegistry. In the M0.5 proposal we
_do_ distinguish between Context Provider and Context Factory. 

I suspect that Greg is in the middle of working on a further revised
proposal. I had, for example, suggested that M0.5 should be based on
something less platform dependent than java.security but that java.security
could be a good implementation strategy (as could the Eclipse OSGI mechanism
we are currently using). So I think he's taking that suggestion into
consideration too. So as you can see this is an area that is still rapidly
evolving. Maybe we can talk about it on the higgins call tomorrow.

> 
> Context Factory
> So, the Context Factory is an implementation which takes "policy" as
> input and produces Context instances.  The Context Factory does not
> concern itself with the evaluation nor enforcement of policy.  This is
> designed for any given context.  Is this correct?

Yes.

> 
> Thanks,
> Tom
> 
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