[news.eclipse.technology.ecp] Re: Proposed project name

[neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Neil Bartlett)]

> 1. Do we expect some of our bundles to run in a non-osgi environment?

This should come naturally from the principle of minimizing dependencies. 
If certain bundles contain code that can run outside OSGi, then they would 
quite naturally not have a runtime dependency on OSGi interfaces.

I think it's important not to reinvent the wheel however, so if a bundle 
doesn't deal specifically with OSGi then we should question whether it 
belongs in ECP or would be better brought in from elsewhere. For example 
rather than reimplementing a JDBC framework we should use Spring's.

> 2. Will we have integration with other platform environments like JEE, 
> JME and Portals?

There are two issues here. One is embedding of OSGi/ECP in other server 
products, the other is the ability to run legacy code such as EJBs within 
ECP.

I think that the first of these should NOT be a priority. Firstly there 
are some hard technical limits such as the fact that (inside J2EE) we are 
forbidden from creating ClassLoaders, SecurityManagers and threads, and 
we're not allowed to access the filesystem. It's hard to see how to run 
OSGi given those constraints.

Secondly, as I understand it, this project is all about a break from the 
past. ECP offers a substantially simpler (and yet more powerful) platform 
than J2EE. Early J2EE servers did not have to be embedded within a CORBA 
product, so ECP should not have to live inside JBoss/WebLogic/whatever.

However I do think it would be a great to allow some kind of compatibility 
layer to run customers' legacy EJBs, MDBs, etc. This would significantly 
reduce the risk of adoption and the cost of migration.

> 3. What Eclipse tools or other projects are we looking to build on to 
> bring about Enterprise Components world domination 2.0 (patent pending)?

I can't comment on this as I'm not familiar with WTP.

- Neil