On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Sam Ruby wrote:
> Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> >
> > So in a sense, Directory is another library project with open
> > rules (like agora). (Not sure if Agora was going to be a
> > Library peer in Jakarta-land, or a 'product peer' in Library-land.
>
> My biggest concern is that I don't understand the relationship between
> Library, Directory, Agora, and Avalon.
>
> Avalon has been in the process of splitting into multiple cvs repositories,
> using the naming convention of jakarta-avalon-xxx.
>
> It would be a simple matter to create a jakarta-avalon-dbpool.
>
> I'd like to hear consensus with someone representing jakarta-avalon (i.e.,
> Peter Donald) before creating another subproject with overlapping goals.
>
> - Sam Ruby
>
>
Sorry for not including the text of the responses to this, I'll answer
those seperately later. I think I have a way of describing the project
that would make the distinction clearer. I sent an email describing the
differences between this project and avalon earlier and a few others have
stated similar descriptions so I'll concentrate on one thing: describing
this project.
As far as I understand it, this project is very similar to the 'commons'
on a university campus ( sometimes called the quad or whatever else sounds
good ). It is a place where the members of the university share common
services like a library, usually a bookstore, etc... that don't fit into
the purpose of the colleges/departments that make up the university. In
the same way this project is more service-based than product-based. In the
same way this project is very much focused on being neutral in terms of
'belonging' to one project or another ( note that I will not claim that
politics won't happen here, in many cases political discussions occur
mainly in the common/shared area of an organization by nature, and
shouldn't be seen as a 'bad' thing or counterproductive ). So here is a
quick map of how I see the project:
Jakarta Commons ( hey let's throw yet another name on the pile ;) Project
Agora Service:
* As described before a 'sandbox' where people from different
projects can come together and work on taking common code
and forming it into something that can be shared.
Catalog Service ( I've been tempted to propose calling this 'Dewey'
after the old card catalog/subject numbering system
subjected on many of us in earlier years ):
* A way for end users to look up the products present in the library
and in the jakarta projects. ( Ted can give a more detailed
description of this :)
Library Service:
* A place for matured 'products' ( quite possibly developed in the
Agora service ) to be stored for use/reuse by end users. Much of
what makes up the library service provides is based upon the
other two services, what really makes the difference is the
standards set for inclusion of the products in the library as
seperate products ( documentation, testing, support ).
The goal shared by this project and the services it holds is the to
facilitate sharing code that is common both internally within jakarta and
the projects it holds and externally in the end products built with the
products of jakarta by users. A side effect of this goal/project
combination is it gives the jakarta committers a place to do this type of
work and experimentation without having a detrimental effect to the
projects they are working on. Hope this helps, and if I'm way off base
anyone can fix up this description how they see fit.
David
