Don't stone me for mentioning a Microsoft product, but I just sat through a meeting to learn about the dot NET platform. It was very enlightening, and it underlined something that I think we need to pursue. Dot NET is all about making things easier on the developer, so the framework takes care of transport issues (i.e. all components are XML serializable by default), a common runtime, etc.
Microsoft focuses on the tools and the developers, while IBM, SUN, etc. focus on hardware. This is a fundamental difference. The point is that it seems like Microsoft has been listening to alot of the complaints--esp. as relates to the developers. Things like DLL hell going away for .NET enabled applications because they borrowed from NeXT's (and OS/X) distribution format prove that they are making steps in the right direction. It's all motivated to be the alpha and omega of platforms, but that is beside the point.
How this affects us, is that for future development, I would like us to persue making things really simple for the developer *using* Avalon. That means that we provide the tools (command-line/ANT/ GUI/etc.) that helps developers write Avalon components. We provide the test cases to make sure everything works properly. It's about our users (who happen to be developers). It's not about having the prettiest glass cathedral. It's not about being perfect. It's about being useful. It's about providing the best tools so that component management is really easy. It's about making it truly a higher cost to do things the old way.
There are several things we can learn from the "dark company" to make Avalon rock. There are also some things that we can do to show SUN just how J2EE *should* have been done. Deployment should not be a question mark. We all have very different facilities available to us. We should all use that to our advantage. It will also require some of our "closet committers" to come out in the open and get their hands dirty.
We should strive towards seamless integration in the way we declare and store meta-data. We should provide rock solid features--but have a flexible enough architecture where we can experiment with new features while we are making the core rock solid.
We should also strive (contrary to Microsoft) to encourage container development outside of Avalon--which means we provide the tools to validate and verify containers and how they interact with Avalon components.
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