I am back to the plugin engine topic again. Now it is out of the
hypothetical realm, as 3.0 development has already started.
First I wanted to address earlier suggestion by Ahmed [1] to use JPF
[2]. Cayenne *as a package* is released under Apache license. ASF has
an explicit policy that prohibits bundling (L)GPL software. We can't
even use Launch4j for the Windows distro as it has a binary component
that is distributed with Cayenne. The only "workaround" for the LGPL
"incompatibility" is to release the Modeler entirely outside of
Apache, which is certainly NOT what we want.
*****
Another candidate is Platonos [3]. Which is an excellent one, but as
Ahmed and myself pointed out, the project is dormant, as its
developers can't for personal reasons dedicate much time to it.
I contacted Platonos developers to get a better feeling of the
situation (I am cc'ing to Kevin and Evert who are the main force
behind the project). To be entirely accurate the project is not
dormant - Evert is developing a new version [4], which I still need
to explore, and looking into JSR 198 (A Standard Extension API for
IDE, which itself seems dormant :-)). And Kevin is consistently
providing support on the user mailing list. Essentially the situation
is slightly better than I had with JStaple some time ago (really
passionate about the project, but not realistic to do 100 things at
once).
Kevin suggested donating Platonos code to Apache. In the ideal world
this would be a great idea. This is a very nice component that would
fit either in Jakarta commons or Cayenne (believe it or not, such
commonly useful thing as a plugin engine is nowhere to be found).
Still with no support from the original developers for the time-
consuming incubation process, I don't see this as an option at this
time. Essentially this would place the Platonos incubation burden on
Cayenne committers. Don't know about others, but for me this is out
of the question at the moment. While I'd be glad to mentor such
project at the Incubator, anything beyond that is unrealistic until
Cayenne's own incubation is finished. Maybe we can scout for
volunteers on the Incubator list??
Anyways, IMO the best option would be to start with current Platonos
code, working out any issues with Kevin and Evert. Kevin also
suggested giving commit access to interested Cayenne committers.
While I am not psyched about taking over the project without any
sense of direction on my end (this is a bit un-Apache as well), it
will be sort of a guarantee for the ongoing support of CayenneModeler
requirements. The first one of those being Maven builds from repo
that we could use in Cayenne.
Thoughts? Comments?
(Kevin, Evert, please feel free to chime in as well)
Andrus
[1] http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/lists/cayenne-devel/2006/07/0032.html
[2] http://jpf.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://platonos.sourceforge.net
[4] http://platonos.cvs.sourceforge.net/platonos/ppe2/
