Hi all, The bigbang branch where we are heavily refactoring the server is going very well. The changes that we're making are cleaning up a lot of questionable glue code that has cluttered the server. We can thank Chris and David Jencks for being persistent on this matter because the rewards of using Spring as they suggested are huge.
Regardless this email is not about getting status out although that's good too. I wanted really to point out to those who had issues with the existing architecture in trunk that now is the best time to hale us on those problems to be considered in the big bang. Anything can be done now since we're getting aggressive with changes. If we do not have the issues sited in the past in mind in the refactoring then we might cause greater problems in the future. I know some issues were pointed out regarding virtualization. Also there are other matters like a global cache. Perhaps we can list these issues in this thread and consider what needs to be done to at least provide hooks for these subsystems even if they are not implemented in totality. Here's my short list: virtualization - virtual and calculated attributes, entries, and backends global cache - we need one but how do we best enable one monitoring - JMX? security manager - sandboxing stored procedure code authorization identity - separation of authenticated and authorized identities transactionality - for server local transactions and not LDAP transactions or distributed transactions locking and synchronization OSGi concerns There is no way one person can keep tabs on all these factors while we are in the big bang. We probably cannot do it all together either. We probably cannot list everything either. However it's worth trying even if it is just a listing of general concerns: it's worth just trying to make sure we can make the best of this refactoring opportunity. Thanks, Alex
