[news.eclipse.technology.swordfish] Looking to publish services as SOAP

["James Peltzer" <canadianguy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Swordfish,
My company is looking to build a number of server services on the Equinox
OSGi implementation.  We already use the Eclipse RCP as a platfrom for our
client application(s).

Our other teams use SOAP as their primary method of communication
information from one application/machine to another and we would like to
keep it easy for them to make use of our remote services (ie.  we would like
to continue using SOAP).

After spending a fair bit of time trying to get Axis2 up and running inside
of Equinox and then trying to replace the Axis2 configurator with something
that is aware of bundles instead of axis archives, we discovered some of the
Corona plugins used by Apache Muse.  With some effort, I was able to get
these plugins working to a limited degree.

As it turns out, Corona has dropped its development of these axis2 plugins
in favour of concentrating on its main project goals.  This leaves us once
again looking for a reasonable way of publishing remote OSGi services via
SOAP.  Naturally, we would hope someone else is solving this problem so we
too can concentrate our efforts on our services rather than the
communications.

In an ideal world I would find something like this:
Feature 1 would like to use something in Feature 2.
Feature 2 might not be available at all, might be directly accessible as a
bundle in the same OSGi instance, or might be available remotely.

If Feature 1 queries a service registry for Feature 2 (and Feature 2 is
available), it would get back a copy of Feature 2's public interface.  When
Feature 1 makes calls to Feature 2'S API, it doesn't care if it is directly
accessing Feature 2 or if Feature 2 is being accessed remotely.


While looking around at other Eclipse projects, I came across Swordfish and
read the proposal.  The proposal seems to read fairly close to what we are
looking for.

What I would like to know is if I am correct in reading that Swordfish is
what I'm looking for.  I am also curious about the current state of the
project and if there is any documentation available to start using it.
Failing any of that, I would happily accept suggestions for other places to
look for more information.

Thanks for your assistance and sorry for the lengthly post.

-James