[news.eclipse.technology.etf] Comments on ETF proposal

["Ed Burnette" <ed.burnette@xxxxxxx>]

First, a trivial observation then something more substantial.

First, I'd like to encourage new projects like yours to pick more meaningful 
names if at all possible rather than three letter acronyms. Especially 
acronyms with redundant letters like E for Eclipse and F for Framework. For 
example, how about "trust" or "identity" or "social"? Put another way, a few 
months down the road when we have ETF, ECF, EDF, EHF, EJF, and so on, nobody 
is going to know what is what and we'll run out of letters, or start using P 
(platform) or other variations to make it even more confusing.

Next, I've read the proposal and the newsgroup to date. Mostly I'm looking 
for something that allows single sign-on, integrates with platform 
authentication mechanisms. For example, if I'm on Windows there should be no 
need for me to log in to an application with a userid/password since I 
already did that. Let's say there's a "Clipsezilla" browser that looks like 
Firefox except it's written with Eclipse. The browser should be able to use 
NTLM authentication to talk to intranet web sites like Firefox can do. Also 
important is impersonation. With the proper setup, an RCP app should be able 
to temporarily behave like a certain person (file access, database 
connectivity, etc.) with all the rights and privleges that person has.

The proposal and supporting material at socialphysics.org seems to put the 
most emphasis on things like contacts, buddy lists, ratings, collaboration, 
buddy lists, and social networks. While this is interesting, it doesn't seem 
to have a lot of usefulness for the kind of boring business apps I write. 
Perhaps these social framework aspects should be in one project (i.e., this 
one) and the more pedantic issues like security, authorization, 
authentication, username, password, keyring, login screen, platform 
integration, and so forth that are common to so many apps should be in 
another (say, what's currently called the Equinox Security "work area"). The 
social framework would be built on top of the communications framework and 
the security framework. Does that make sense?

-- 
Ed Burnette
www.eclipsepowered.org