[news.eclipse.technology.ecp] Re: More on the project name, and relation

[neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Neil Bartlett)]

Alex,

I have some concerns about how necessary these layers are, especially when 
they are defined in such woolly terms. For example "Bean Component Model" 
conveys no information to me - all three words are so abstract as to be 
meaningless. What are you actually building?

In my opinion, OSGi doesn't need any "Enterprise Platform" or "Framework" 
on top of it. OSGi is already all the platform we need, and it doesn't 
need all these extra layers - we just need some services.

For example look at things like Event Admin, Wire Admin, SCR, etc. They're 
not "layers", which implies that things in the higher layers will only 
work if all the lower layers are in place. They're just services. 
Similarly, "enterprise" capabilities can be supplied as nothing more than 
a bunch of services.

Unfortunately "enterprise" is another woolly, meaningless word. Here's 
what I think it comprises:

- Declarative security (mostly provided by OSGi User Admin and Conditional 
Perm services anyway)
- Transaction management and 2PC
- Declarative transactions - best to do this with AOP techiques, need to 
look at AJEER and AOSGI
- Asynchronous message delivery - eg the "message driven service" stuff 
I've been working on
- Remote invocation - how do clients (paricularly RCP clients) call our 
server?
- Web apps and servlet - lots of possibilities here including Wolfgang's 
RSP work, Wicket, etc
- Persistence - developer choice is crucial with this one, it should be 
possible to choose Hibernate, Toplink, iBatis or plain old JDBC.
- Anything I've missed?

The above services should all work great together, but also any one should 
be usable on its own, and they should also work well with bundles that are 
not supplied by the ECP project. Ie, only standard OSGi facilities like 
the Service Layer should be used for inter-bundle integration. 
Implementation details like Spring ApplicationContexts should NOT be 
leaked between bundles.

My preferred name for the project would therefore be something that didn't 
include either the words platform or framework. How about:

- Eclipse Enterprise Bundles (Eclipse EB)
- Eclipse Enterprise Services (Eclipse ES)
- Eclipse Enterprise Edition (Eclipse EE or EEE) :-)

Regards,
Neil