Introduction

Policy Editor is a proposed sub-project under the top level project Eclipse SOA Tools Platform (STP). 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

The mission of the STP project is to build frameworks and extensible tools that enable the design, configuration, assembly, deployment, monitoring, and management of software designed around a Service Oriented Architecture. The project is guided by the values of transparency, extensibility, vendor neutrality, community collaboration, agile development, and standards-based innovation.

Currently, 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 transform the current STP Policy Editor component into a sub-project of STP project.

Description

The main goal of the STP Policy Editor sub-project is the further development and improvement of the existing component.

A secondary goal is to identify aspects within the policy editor that could be of general interest to other eclipse projects and to provide them as seperate bundles so they can be easily re-used outside the sub-project.

We also aim to link the STP Policy Editor 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 Editor will focus on providing an advanced and user-friendly editor component for user-defined policy languages that conform to the WS-Policy standard. 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.

Out of scope

The Policy Editor will not provide concrete editors for formats apart from policy documents.

Proposed Components

Main Policy Editor component
Policy detail editor component
Validation framework

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.

STP The Policy Editor will aim to supply policy editing capabilities to any STP sub-project and component that requires this capability. At the least, this would cover
- Intermediate Model
- BPMN Modeler
- SCA tools
EMF project will be used to create a model to represent WS-Policy documents for processing within the Policy Editor and for interoperability with other EMF-based components.

Other projects will be added to this list when required.

Organization

We propose that this sub-project will take place under the top level project STP.

Proposed initial committers

Gerald Preissler (leader) - SOPERA - STP Policy Editor component committer
Andrei Shakirin - SOPERA - STP Policy Editor component committer
Alexey Markevich - SOPERA - STP Policy Editor component committer
Alexandr Tselesh - SOPERA - STP Policy Editor component committer
Renat Zubairov - SOPERA - will be proposed as a new committer. He has already intiated the Policy Editor GUI walkthrough and will work on the refactoring of the user interface.

Code Contributions

The Eclipse STP/Policy Editor component will be the initial code.

Interested Parties

tbd

Tentative Plan

tbd