Ok, here's the vision proposal for the Cactus architecture and how users would be able to use it:
http://cvs.apache.org/~vmassol/cactus_new/archi_users.jpg
Nothing revolutionary but it better shows the extensibility and the willingness to open up cactus to other protocols and other proxies (for lack of a better word - feel free to suggest name ideas).
Comments?
My concern with this proposal is that we might be introducing additional abstraction layers without really having thought/discussed about the requirements of the "other" parts in the diagram (or have we?).
Currently, Cactus is a rather lightweight package focussed on doing one particular thing: getting into a web container for unit-testing web-components. This also allows users to get into the J2EE container for testing non-web-components such as EJBs. There has been some experimentation for getting directly to the EJBs over RMI and such, but no such code has been committed to the repo, and I've personally never seen it.
I'd really like to see some discussion on how the SPIs might look before taking any concrete actions. I also would prefer to see an implementation other than the current HTTP/Servlet one, so that we have a better idea of what the requirements for the SPIs will be. It usually takes some working code and experience in at least two "extensions" before effective abstract interfaces can be extracted for generic extensibility.
Further, I am afraid that the framework code common to all of the target environments might be too thin. Maybe the common core is more of a *pattern* than something that can effectively put into a API/SPI framework.
To summarize, I think it's premature to make this strategy "official", because we (or at least I) don't have enough experience with integrating different protocol/broker types with Cactus. Before we abstract, we should have something that needs to abstracted, and the abstraction needs to provide a real-world benefit.
Cheers, -chris
PS: For me, Cactus is just a great tool to perform unit tests inside a web container, i.e. most of the time I only use it to test servlet/taglib/struts stuff. So /my/ "vision" for Cactus is simply to make that as easy and painless as possible :-)
-- Christopher Lenz /=/ cmlenz at gmx.de
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