On 05/18/2012 07:03 PM, Carlucci, Tony wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Geer [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 12:29 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Rave Architecture
On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Franklin, Matthew B.
<[email protected]>wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Geer [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 10:00 AM
To: dev
Subject: [DISCUSS] Rave Architecture
I wanted to start a conversation regarding the long term architecture of
Rave. I'm primarily interested in how Rave will ultimately be able to be
deployed.
A while back Ate posted ~25 architectural topics[1] to start generating
discussion around. As we go to build out a roadmap, we will need to make
sure we expand on each of these.
Currently, as you know, Rave is built and deployed as a series of three
web
apps, ROOT (mostly Shindig), portal (main rave features) and wookie (I'm
not counting demogadgets). This model has it's advantages since all you
have to do upgrade is replace a war file since it's all self contained.
However, this model also has some drawbacks.
In a perfect world it would be great if Rave could support multiple
deployment models. My personal preference would be to see Rave be
able to
be deployed modularly in an OSGi container (Rave services advertised as
OSGi services, etc). This would give a lot of freedom for interacting with
Rave programmatically, for scaling, for incremental upgrades and
supporting
plug-n-play services (JPA vs JCR for example).
In looking at the system it wouldn't be horribly difficult to convert it
to
deploy modularly into an OSGI container but I also realize there are going
to be people who want a standard WAR distribution. I didn't have any
brilliant ideas of how to structure things to support both as different
build options but I wanted to raise the idea anyway and see if others had
any thoughts. Do others see a need to have a more modular deployment
model
in their use of Rave? Have there been other discussions around this
already?
Hadrian was discussing OSGI enabling Rave at some point. I would
recommend putting a detailed proposal in the architecture topics of the
wiki and start getting some discussion around the specifics of how this
would be accomplished. I am sure others will help refine it from there...
Before spending a lot of time putting together a detailed proposal I guess
I was looking to gather some thoughts on what options people would like to
support. That will greatly impact the detailed proposal.
I think there will still be a strong need for the full bundled wars, so
whatever solution is developed should be able support that scenario.
Yes, I agree.
But I also see and support the need for alternate and possibly more 'pluggable'
solutions. OSGi surely is one of them although personally I am not much
interested in it.
But there are other alternatives as well.
For us the Rave portal war as we have today merely is a 'demo'.
Embedding, integrating and merging the Rave portal *functionality* (and more)
within our own web application(s) stack is our goal instead of using it
'standalone'.
In addition, we do have the need to provide pluggable and for some maybe even
runtime deployable components and services. But OSGi 'hot-deployment' IMO is far
less needed than propagated by some OSGi advocates, and for that I'd prefer an
easier and more light-weight solution which isn't so invasive throughout the
whole architecture.
At any rate, OSGi support very well should be possible I think and has been
discussed before.
Side note: AFAIK Shindig so far isn't very OSGi friendly although I know some
managed to wrap it in OSGi.
Ate
Tony
Thanks,
Chris
[1] : http://wiki.apache.org/rave/ArchitectureTopics
