Sorry for being late to the party I was busy with mavenization :-)
Felix is an OSGi impl currently incubating.
http://incubator.apache.org/felix/index.html
OSGi has been very successful as the Eclipse runtime plugin
management framework.
Thoughts?
-bd-
On Jul 22, 2006, at 6:26 PM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
I am back to the plugin engine topic again. Now it is out of the
hypothetical realm, as 3.0 development has already started.
First I wanted to address earlier suggestion by Ahmed [1] to use
JPF [2]. Cayenne *as a package* is released under Apache license.
ASF has an explicit policy that prohibits bundling (L)GPL software.
We can't even use Launch4j for the Windows distro as it has a
binary component that is distributed with Cayenne. The only
"workaround" for the LGPL "incompatibility" is to release the
Modeler entirely outside of Apache, which is certainly NOT what we
want.
*****
Another candidate is Platonos [3]. Which is an excellent one, but
as Ahmed and myself pointed out, the project is dormant, as its
developers can't for personal reasons dedicate much time to it.
I contacted Platonos developers to get a better feeling of the
situation (I am cc'ing to Kevin and Evert who are the main force
behind the project). To be entirely accurate the project is not
dormant - Evert is developing a new version [4], which I still need
to explore, and looking into JSR 198 (A Standard Extension API for
IDE, which itself seems dormant :-)). And Kevin is consistently
providing support on the user mailing list. Essentially the
situation is slightly better than I had with JStaple some time ago
(really passionate about the project, but not realistic to do 100
things at once).
Kevin suggested donating Platonos code to Apache. In the ideal
world this would be a great idea. This is a very nice component
that would fit either in Jakarta commons or Cayenne (believe it or
not, such commonly useful thing as a plugin engine is nowhere to be
found). Still with no support from the original developers for the
time-consuming incubation process, I don't see this as an option at
this time. Essentially this would place the Platonos incubation
burden on Cayenne committers. Don't know about others, but for me
this is out of the question at the moment. While I'd be glad to
mentor such project at the Incubator, anything beyond that is
unrealistic until Cayenne's own incubation is finished. Maybe we
can scout for volunteers on the Incubator list??
Anyways, IMO the best option would be to start with current
Platonos code, working out any issues with Kevin and Evert. Kevin
also suggested giving commit access to interested Cayenne
committers. While I am not psyched about taking over the project
without any sense of direction on my end (this is a bit un-Apache
as well), it will be sort of a guarantee for the ongoing support of
CayenneModeler requirements. The first one of those being Maven
builds from repo that we could use in Cayenne.
Thoughts? Comments?
(Kevin, Evert, please feel free to chime in as well)
Andrus
[1] http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/lists/cayenne-devel/
2006/07/0032.html
[2] http://jpf.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://platonos.sourceforge.net
[4] http://platonos.cvs.sourceforge.net/platonos/ppe2/
