Re: fulcrum short-term

[Nicola Ken Barozzi]

Stephen Haberman wrote:

On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 08:59:34AM +0100, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:

In any case, we will be releasing Fortress quite soon. The best
thing is to try and keep the Components as un-tied to a specific
container as possible, so that they can be reused by others. That
is the route we will take with Cornerstone and Excalibur.

I definitely agree with the container-agnostic approach. I've got an
app I need to get up and running in a container ASAP (we dropped a
Turbine-3 web frontend in favor of an XML-RPC service), so I'm
looking at Phoenix and my general understanding is that I can write
the components with just the framework interfaces (per the
avalon-apps/demo) to be container-agnostic, but then use some
container-specific meta data to wrap them together into, in this
case, blocks to be started by Phoenix.

Will Fortress be along the lines of something I point at components
and it will start them up as a server daemon type thing? Or is it
more like ECM, which (as I've gathered from the existing Fulcrum use
of it) just does component management as a Java object, and would
have to have some other thread/process create it and the loop until
it should shutdown?

Fortress is meant to be ECM 2, so it doesn't have the "block" concept. I'm using it as a daemon in my projects, but with a flat component management structure.

We are now quite confident that after Fortress release, Merlin and Fortress will merge completely and make the sort of container you envision. The important thing here is that we will be releasing and supporting from now on only one container. So Merlin will be a replecement and enhancement for Fortress.

After that we will deliver a unified container, and with that we will stop enhancing Phoenix and have the one and only Avalon container.

Our objective now from a component perspective is the possibility of complete drop-in portability.

Is Fortress to the point where I could get a snapshot/dev release
and use it with little trouble (from two aspects, one in Fulcrum
e.g. for unit testing and the like, and the other in my app as a
server/daemon container)? Or should I wait for the release?

It's almost ready, AFAIK you should be able to use it with no real big problem. We are working on the "wrap-up" phase to get it released.

We will create the Avalon Components project I had proposed you
some time back. Options are a repository under Avalon that is open
to project using them, or one under Apache Commons. In any case,
who uses our components in his project extensively could work on
the repo.  Then we would keep a list of all components using
Avalon, Turbine ones included.

Sounds great.

Thanks for the input. I'm finally getting my hands on some concrete
Avalon stuff instead of just speculating about when Turbine will
become Avalonized, and I'm having fun, it's some very cool
technology.

Thanks :-)

But technology without the "beef" is useless. That's why we are all thrilled that Turbine services are being avalonized. I remember that some years ago we wanted to use Turbine services in Cocoon, but nobody ever got to doing it. Now that possibility is finally getting real :-)

--
Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- verba volant, scripta manent -
(discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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