HiveMind is being very, very actively developed. I've been putting a lot of info onto my blog: http://www.freeroller.net/page/hlship/Weblog
I feel HiveMind is entering a more stable stage after its chaotic birth. I believe it is just about at the point where other interested parties might want to join in the fun! As I've mentioned before, HiveMind is something of an experiment. A chance for me to learn Maven, to establish a project properly within Jakarta and so forth. Hey, I finally learned some XSL! I realize that some aspects of Avalon and HiveMind overlap. I think our goals are a bit different. HiveMind is intended to form a lower-layer; Avalon is a services container, HiveMind is a services and configuration microkernel. The majority of HiveMind is related to building and contributing configuration elements. HiveMind expressly does not have the same kind of Inversion of Control that Avalon has; IoC or not is left to the developer. Avalon (or at least the Avalon containers I researched) require more explicit connection of services. I did not see anything akin to an Eclipse plugin model for handling configuration ... that's HiveMind's strong suit ... HiveMind's "assembly" stage occurs dynamically, at runtime. I know it sounds like "not invented here" syndrome, but I had a short window of opportunity to put something together, keep it open-source, but use it in a very large scale project at work. In this situation, it was faster, easier and politcally safer for me to build it myself than it would be to take the time to fully grok and adapt Avalon. Additionally, a key requirement for me is line precise error reporting [*]; this is a major amount of work to graft into an existing code base. Ultimately, I see HiveMind fitting in below Avalon; perhaps it may be adopted as the way in which the Avalon container is configured, rather than the way services hosted within the Avalon container are configured. [*] In Tapestry, and now in HiveMind, XML configuration files are read and converted into "descriptor" objects, which are then used to create runtime objects. In Tapestry, it's component specifications used to create components and pages and such. In HiveMind it is more open-ended. The line precise bit is: when the XML files are read, the exact location (file, line and column) for each descriptor object is recorded as a property of the object. When the descriptor object is used to create a runtime object, this location property is applied to the runtime object. The end result is that exceptions in the runtime objects, long after files have been parsed, can be related back to exact locations within the input files. You don't have to sleuth it out from a stack trace, a property of the exception will be the exact location to look. This works out to be a tremendous productivity boost ... you spend very little time guessing at problems, instead the framework directs you to the exact problem. This is all combined with exceptions that include a location property, and Tapestry's exception reporting mechanism is capable of displaying those location properties. One of the reasons I've been rolling out HiveMind is to seperate this very useful functionality from Tapestry. In fact, Tapestry 3.1 will move a lot of code from Tapestry to HiveMind. -- Howard M. Lewis Ship Creator, Tapestry: Java Web Components http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry > -----Original Message----- > From: Martin Cooper [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 3:17 PM > To: Jakarta Commons Developers List > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [HiveMind] Question about HiveMind scope and purpose > > > > > On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Berin Loritsch wrote: > > > Berin Loritsch wrote: > > > > > Someone pointed out to me that there is a Commons Sandbox project > > > called HiveMind, and according to the docs at > > > > http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-commons-sandbox/hive mind/x > > docs/index.xml > > > > it sounds a *lot* like Avalon. > > > > Instead of reinventing the wheel, what about collaborating with the > > Avalon team to correct what you feel are deficiencies and work from > > there. > > > > The Avalon team is in a place where they are evaluating what they > > have, and where they want to go from there. > > Is HiveMind in active development? Any interest at all? It seems to be in development, but only by hlship. I suspect he isn't on this list, so I'm cc'ing him to see if we can provoke a response. ;-) -- Martin Cooper > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
