Re: [orion-dev] Can Orion be less Eclipse

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gorkem,

The layout of the Orion client is mainly
an accident of history, because of how it was developed. The main Orion
download we produce today is a Java EE application, and OSGi is very common
in Java EE world. We use Jetty for the open source download, but within
IBM there are products that ship Orion as a WAR file running on other servers
such as Websphere. 

You are right that there is absolutely
no runtime benefit for the client side pieces to be organized into OSGi
bundles. It is essentially just being used as a development-time and build-time
way to separate out the client side pieces that are separately consumable.
For example if you don't want Git you can carve out that piece and use
the rest of the server. I think we would be fine with reorganizing the
client side and use a different source layout as long as we maintained
separation of those concerns. I.e., if you were interested in working on
reorganizing the client code that would be welcome!

As for the Java server technology, I
guess "standard" is a loaded term. Java Servlets and OSGi are
standards as much as JAX-RS. The question is what problem are we solving
by moving to a different Java server side technology? Is the main concern
about barrier to contributors, or is it about consumability of the Java
server on other Java EE application servers? Or maybe both?

John




From:      
 "Gorkem Ercan"
<gorkem.ercan@xxxxxxxxx>
To:      
 "Orion developer
discussions" <orion-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:      
 04/01/2015 01:27 PM
Subject:    
   [orion-dev]
Can Orion be less Eclipse
Sent by:    
   orion-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

---

Hi,

I have been interacting with a group of developers who are considering
to adopt and contribute to Orion. While talking with them I started to
realize the current structure of Orion is presenting an unnecessary
barrier for adoption for those who are not familiar with the Eclipse IDE
development.

For instance, the client part of Orion is organized as OSGi bundles.
And these JS projects are built with maven/tycho which is not very
familiar to JS developers. I am not aware of any benefit for using
bundles for the client bits or organizing them as bundles. Is there a
good reason for continuing to do so? IMHO the client parts of Orion
should not have any Eclipseness in it and adopt more of node.js and
grunt practices.

The Java backend is also puzzling to even seasoned server side java
developers. There are servlets but it is all mixed up into OSGi and
moreover Eclipse plugin extensions. It can practically be only
run/developed on Eclipse IDE. And I suspect that Jetty is a hard to
replace part Orion Java backend. For me the lack of use of standards
such as JAX-RS on the Java backend, is puzzling. I think the future
development of the Java backend should be driven more towards Java
server standards so that it is familiar to a larger audience.

As an Eclipse developer, I do not recognize much of these (or similar 
ones I have omitted) but they do provide a barrier to newcomers.

Thanks,
--
Gorkem
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