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[wtp-pmc] My Notes from Arch. Council Meeting 12/13,14/2006


Here's my rough notes from last weeks EMO Council meeting, that I thought were most relevent to our WTP Project.

Move to Java 5 ... slow to move completely

On JVM version: we, in WTP will likely need to meet requirement to run on 1.3 (develop with 1.4)  and things
that are 1.5 specific (annotations, EJB3.0) will have to be "selectively enabled" if running on 1.5.
I have little idea how much this will complicate things.

Activities and Activity Categories

        Kevin H. (platform) does recommend coarse grained capabilities correspond with plugins (or collections of plugins) .... not finer than that.
        Richared (Borland) does have finer grained capabilites than that (in their products), "within plugin" capabilities.
            So, still up to us ... we want simplest approach, but some adopters have wanted us to use them to distringuish "basic" vs. "advanced"
                versions of functions. (we provide the basic, they provide the advanced :)
        (Issue or bug for us ... if JDT is "disabled" ... our JST stuff should not show up?).
        Recommendation: We still explore some small use of "basic" vs. "advanced" functionality, we have clients that need it.
        (We should spell those out, and be sure there's no other solutions). [I also suspect we need capabiliites at component levels, not our 'product' level]


ICU4J

It will be in M4. it is 3 Mb (considered ok for IDE huge download, but too large for RCP apps -- many of them are only 6 or 9 megs themselves!).
Its clear no one is stepping up to Unicode 4 functions -- would have large impact (2 bytes characters ... nasty).
(btw, Souce will stay in source forge, binaries only in Eclipse).

Some assumed "low hanging fruit": MessageFormat, DateFormat, Calendar, Collator.

We ... WTP ... need to work with Kevin and team in January to see if any "breaking" cases for WTP
(especially where we intersect with code outside our Eclipse control, xerces, axis, etc.).
If outright "breaks" or seems like big effort for us ... that might be enough to postpone the whole thing.
(but, I suspect small effort, and complications won't even be known for quite a while).

Note: there was a bunch of vagueness on "how to test if working" ... no one in that room knew anything about that.
(I might know someone who could help).

Recommendation: In January or so, I'll load up ICU4J, get advice from platform teams on what to look at changing .. and see if that breaks
any class types with third party code.



Threading and Jobs

     We have a problem with this in WTP, so I asked group about their experieces.
     No one (admitted) to having wide spread problems
    Just large engineering effort needed (by platforrm).
    Michael (windriver) said they did have problems, one tip he gave was they actually used aspectJ to insert diagnostic  
            code just to understand what threads called what objects ...
            e.g. surprised when found found some spawned from 'decorator' thread.
    Recommendation: form "cross component team" to focus on this topic for a while in January.
         Find main problems, make recommendations to other teams.


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