[ecf-dev] ECF third party dependencies

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi ECF folks,

Hope all of you are well.  Some water under the bridge since I last 
communicated on this mailing list.  My apologies for that.

Contrary to appearances, the ECF project is still very much alive and 
kicking.   Actually, remote services has been moving along quite a bit 
over the past few years...e.g. support for gRPC distribution provider, 
bndtools-based tooling (e.g. osgi services wizard in bndtools 7.1, 
bndtools code generation for gRPC/protoc, gRPC streaming support with 
reactive API, publish to maven central, osgi remote services test suite 
uses ECF remote services for testing, other new discovery [etcd] and 
distribution [Hazelcast] providers, bndtools workspace and project 
template, move to github [1] and [2], etc).

There are, however, some housekeeping chores needed wrt use of (now very 
old) third party dependencies.  Ed Merks has identified the oldest of 
these (that haven't been updated) in this [3] issue.

I have yet to go all the dependencies that Ed lists but I think they 
mostly fall into 3 categories

1) The ones associated with supporting (now) old/unused by platform 
versions of httpclient/httpcomponents.   I will deal with these, json 
and com.sun.syndication dependencies.

2) The dependencies associated with the ECF zookeeper discovery 
provider.   I think this is basically an old version of log4j, and the 
apache zookeeper lib.  I would ask that Wim Jongman (who was the 
original author of zookeeper discovery provider) let me know how he 
would like this to be dealt with.   My inclination is to deprecate/no 
longer deploy the 3.9 version of zookeeper provider and remove it's old 
dependencies from the ECF target platform. Wim please let me know if 
that sits with you and/or something else should happen.

3) The dependency (org.xbill.dns) associated with the ECF dnssd 
discovery provider.  This discovery provider was originally written by 
Markus Kuppe, and so I would ask that Markus please let me know if I/we 
should/could do something other than deprecate the dnssd discovery 
provider.

Thanksinadvance to Wim and Markus for letting me know.

Thanks to the rest of you.  I've missed working with you on ECF. I 
personally intend to continue to work in 2024 on/improve the remote 
services tooling (especially bndtools-based tooling) around ECF remote 
services, with an emphasis on the gRPC bndtools-based tooling (osgi 
service wizard, gRPC code generation, etc).

Best,

Scott

[1] https://github.com/eclipse/ecf

[2] https://github.com/ECF

[3] https://github.com/eclipse/ecf/issues/95