Have been thinking about how to move forward with Fortress/Merlin convergence.
Here is a summary of what I see needs to be done: (a) enable Merlin to handle ECM/Fortress semantics on component lookup (b) enable Fortress to use Merlin assembly of components (c) enable easy (transparent) deployment of components in either container (i.e. launch a Merlin component in Fortress, or lauch a Fortress/ECM component in Merlin) Lookup semantics: ----------------- Currently the Merlin Service/ComponentManager implementation is hard-wired to use role based lookup. I.e. the key passed in under the lookup parameter must correspond to a role name declared in a xinfo file (which defaults to an interface classname). No support is provided for selector semantics. The service/.component manager logic can easily be made pluggable through a declaration at a component or container level. Advantages of making the declaration at a component level is that the policy is colocated with the component. Disadvantes are that (today) that declaration would be merlin specific - unless there is a specifciation of an "Avalon" level lookup processing policy - e.g: avalon:lookup.policy=resolve (interpritation of the value) avalon:lookup.policy=match (no interpritation) Apply properties at the container level (i.e. setting a default policy at the level of the container) would mean that all of the components contained in that container would default to the container value. This would make deployment of existing ECM style components easier. Openening up the Merlin Assembly as a Service --------------------------------------------- Following on from some questions on the avalon-user list I've been looking at how I could implement an assemably service using the Merlin implementation. The objective would be to provide a very simple solution to the assembly of a component - so developers would never have to for things like lifestyle handling in their own code. Transparent Deployment ---------------------- Markus has been working on the configuration converstion tool xfc which aims to provide translatation between different deployment formats. To assist in this work I'm planning on move the Merlin meta model content out of Merlin and into the excalibur/mata package but built as a seperate jar file. There merlin/model content is well seperated from the Merlin implementation (although there I'm not completely happy with a couple of points). In the meantime, I think its worth moving it across so that work related to xfc can leaverage this more easily. Cheers, Steve. -- Stephen J. McConnell OSM SARL digital products for a global economy mailto:mcconnell@;osm.net http://www.osm.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:avalon-dev-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:avalon-dev-help@;jakarta.apache.org> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:avalon-users-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:avalon-users-help@;jakarta.apache.org>