Farr, Aaron wrote:
Hello all.
In light of hammett's email yesterday, I thought I'd play a little devil's advocate in order to feel out everyone's intentions for Excalibur. So why don't I jump right into the heart of it with this question:
Are we here to maintain the Excalibur/Fortress codebase or do we also have intentions on growing it?
I say that because since Excalibur and Fortress's inception there are a lot
of new players in the IoC framework field. With strong development coming
from the likes of Pico, Nano, Spring, and many others, what role do we want
Excalibur to play? What problems are we trying to solve either better or
for the first time? Or are we only looking at preserving the existing
codebase and providing some enhancements to allow an "escape route" from
dependence on Avalon or ECM or Fortress?
One of the big advantages of newer containers are the fact that there's no container-specific API that components must adhere to, thus theoretically allowing cross-container reusability. The viral nature of Avalon APIs is something many people are reluctant with when I explain them how to develop new components in a Cocoon environment (yes, you'll mostly see me here with a Cocoon-oriented mind).
So this "dependency injection" opposed to "dependency lookup" is what makes ECM look old-fashioned even if it provides features today unavailable in newer containers, e.g. component pools, and also some kind of selector-like mechanism (yes, it's sometimes needed).
So it would be good if one of the main missions of this new Excalibur project was, as stated by "the history and future of IOC", to build a modern and embeddable container that provides a smooth migration path to the large number of existing lookup-based component. Carsten's additions to support injection to Fortress are a step in that direction.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
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