On Mon, 18 Nov 2002 22:33, Joerg Buchberger wrote: > Hi. > > I've got a couple of questions on Avalon and Phoenix: > > 1. How stable is Phoenix?
It is stable now and our next big push is basically consolidation of existing work. ie Adding unit tests, making it possible to unit test components in isolation, making the codebase more accessible to extensions etc. So expect it to get more stable over time. There is some work that needs to be done to enable more comprehensive ClassLoader management which will be backwards incompatible and may break a small percentage of phoenix applications but we will work hard to minimize the chance of disruption > 2. Is Phoenix to be replaced by another Avalon project now > or in the near future? Nope. Unless of course Phoenix4.x may get replaced by Phoenix 5.x :) > 3. Is there some component or function, which allows > Phoenix to supervise the status of its blocks? Can Phoenix > thus (be made to) restart a block when necessary? Nope. Blocks can not be restarted individually (at least not at this stage). You can restart Phoenix if you use wrapper.sourceforge.org or you can restart individual applications via JMX web interface. But at this stage there is no fine grain block restarting or health monitoring. > 4. Does Phoenix offer its Blocks any means to communicate > centrally? Not really - we leave that as a responsibility of component developers. > 5. Is there anyone running a Phoenix based system > professionally, i.e. commercially? There are several "enterprise critical" systems that run phoenix as part of their infrastructure. The second largest domain registry runs on it. There is at least a few major telcos (well major in their region) who are adopting phoenix based applications. Theres also at least one bank who has adopted it as part of their infrastructure. From what I am led to believe they are all happy with it. There has also been groups adopt it in mining, entertainment and "people management" industrys. > 6. How about maintainability and testability of Phoenix > running several servers as blocks when operating system > changes, JRE changes, server-app changes come into play? Do > you think this is manageable? Any experiences someone? If you stick to recomended versions of jdk/os combinations then you should have few problems. In the past there was some problems with the IBM jdk but the latest version has been fixed. However the greatest problems that have been experienced are due to problems with underlying incompatabilities across OS/jdk combinations. Linux in particular has caused some headaches as people have installed the jdks on unsupported platforms. Personally I run linux (JDK1.3/jdk1.4 on various RH based systems) as my main deployment platform and I have had no problems. There have also been a few problems in some components written on phoenix due to differences in the underlying OSes. ie Different threading models and their effect on underlying IO (ie if you interrupt a thread will it interrupt blocking io ?), different file locking semantics (NT vs *nix) etc. However these are not specific to Phoenix and there is no known problems with current setup. > 7. How many of the 15(?) people contributing to Avalon are > working on Phoenix? Many have contributed one way or another or work on the underlying infrastrucutre. However there may only be 5-6 actively working on Phoenix atm? Not sure. However if you add in people who are indirectly working on phoenix or who help on user lists the number may be a bit higher. > 8. Are there any public reviews or others opinions on > Avalon availabe somewhere since it is also contributed to > JSR111 Java Services Framework? Unfortunately I believe JSR111 is dead ;( -- Cheers, Peter Donald *------------------------------------------------------* | An expert is someone who knows everything about the | | topic except for its place in the world. | *------------------------------------------------------* -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
