In the SCA Policy framework spec there is a section that talks about bindingType as it appears in the definitions.xml file(s). It says...
702 The bindingType element is used to declare a class of binding available in a SCA Domain. It declares 703 the QName of the binding type, and the set of intents that are natively provided using the optional 704 @alwaysProvides attribute. I hadn't noticed this before but the implication of these words appears to be that a particular binding is not available for use in a domain unless there is a 709 <bindingType type="NCName" 710 alwaysProvides="listOfQNames"? 711 mayProvide="listOfQNames"?/> element in the aggregate definitions.xml file. I guess this also applies to implementationType (which is defined in the assembly spec) and interfaceType and databindingType (which aren't defned in the assembly spec so I just made them up here) Currently Tuscany uses the Java services approach to detect and load extensions. If an extension is loaded it is available for use. We don't check that bindingType, implementationType, etc is declared before making an extension available. As it happens some for our extensions include a defintions.xml file, for example, http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/tuscany/java/sca/modules/binding-ws-axis2/src/main/resources/org/apache/tuscany/sca/binding/ws/axis2/definitions.xml. And in this particular example a bindingType is defined. However this is not true of all of our extensions. Should we enforce the presence of a definitions.xml file in our extensions and enforce that it contains an appropriate ?Type elemenent? On the face of it there seems little benefit to doing this given our Tuscany specific scheme for loading extensions. However it would tip our hat to the spec, assuming we agree this is what the spec means, and give us a place to put other extension configuration information it the need were to arise. Thoughts? Regards Simon
