Hi Stefan, > Hello Globus service and framework developers, > > I want to explain an idea I had about combining a grid service with the > Eclipse framework. > > My goal is to have an Eclipse-based grid service so I can make use of > the elaborate Eclipse plug-in system. This would help in developing > dynamic services as plug-ins can be hot-deployed into the platform.
the overall idea of hot-deployment as a native platform feature has been discussed for example in 2004 (T. Friese, M. Smith, B. Freisleben: Hot Service Deployment in an Ad Hoc Grid Environment In: ICSOC'04, New York, USA, pp. 75-83, ACM Press, 2004 ) apart from our implementation of hot deployment there has been a second experimental branch in the CVS. AFAIK the general implementation did not make it further into the platform. I assume that many real world scenarios use Grid services rather as frontend to heavyweight applications or entire clusters that require more complex installation tasks and thus do not push for the hot-deployment feature. For other scenarios I still see that feature as a highly useful feature and an enabler for real on-demand resource sharing e.g. in the desktop environment. > I would like to discuss about the possibility of spawning a > plug-in-based version of the Globus Toolkit. Via an extension point, new > web services could then be added as Eclipse plug-ins. What is your > opinion about that? On the one hand you would get all the functionality that is available as eclipse plugin, on the other hand you add the complexity and overhead of combining the two container technologies. >From past experience I would opt for native hot deployment support in the Globus framework in the first place. Do you have a use-case (or a list thereof) in mind where your application development would greatly benefit from a collection of existing eclipse plugins? Regards Thomas -- Dr. Thomas Friese Siemens AG, Healthcare Sector Hartmannstraße 16, 91052 Erlangen, Germany Tel.: +49 (9131) 84-3153
