Introduction

Policy Development Kit is a proposed sub-project under the top level Eclipse SOA Platform Project. The proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. You are invited to comment on and join the project. Please send all feedback to the Eclipse STP newsgroup until a proper newsgroup is established.

Background

Policies provide a means to describe just about any property that can be applied to an entity. Corresponding standards, such as the WS-Policy family of standards published by the W3C, have been established to provide a machine-readable, standardized format to capture policies and apply them to selected entities. These standards are being used especially in the SOA context to capture non-functional aspects of services.

Currently, the STP project contains a component named STP Policy Editor. This component provides a GUI-based editor to create and edit XML documents that conform the the WS-Policy standard published by the W3C.

The aim of this proposal is to initiate a sub-project of the SOA Platform Project that builds on the current STP Policy Editor component to provide a more comprehensive toolkit for policy handling.

Description

The charter of the Policy Development Kit sub-project is the creation of extensible tools and exemplar implementations such as editors, connectors, repositories, libraries, storage, validation, management, manipulation and extraction related to policies. Of particular interest are the official WS-Policy standardized formats and assertions that conform to these standards. Beyond WS-Policy, non-XML based policy expressions such as SCA Policy assertions are also of interest for the project.

A secondary goal is to further re-use within the eclipse ecosystem by identifing aspects within the policy editor that could be of general interest to other eclipse projects and to provide them as seperate bundles.

We also aim to link the tools provided by the Policy Development Kit with other Eclipse tools that could apply WS-Policy within their problem domain, such as the STP SCA tools. STP Policy Editor will also interact with the STP Intermediate Model component.

Project Scope

The Policy Development Kit will focus on providing advanced, user-friendly and extensible tools to Internal components that provide generic functionality (i.e., that do not only apply to editing policies) will be provided as seperate bundles to foster re-use. Where appropriate an integration with other projects such as the STP intermediate model, SCA tools and BPMN modeler.

Proposed Components

Relationship with other Eclipse projects

The Policy Editor sub-project will be build on top of the Eclipse Platform and will have relationships with other Eclipse projects. Other projects will be added to this list when required.

Organization

We propose that this sub-project will take place under the top level SOA PLatform Project.

Proposed initial committers

The initial project team will consist of the current committers to the existing STP Policy Editor component: We also propose to add the following person to the list of committers:

Code Contributions

The initial code contribution will consist of the following components:

Interested Parties

Tentative Plan

Milestones