On Sep 1, 2009, at 16:38 , Jeremy Hughes wrote:
It is a goal of the Aries project to provide a natural home for open
source implementations of current and future OSGi EEG specifications,
including the opportunity for the collaborative development of
compliance tests, and an environment to demonstrate the composition of
these technologies and to explore areas where EEG specifications lack
coverage. A further goal of this project is to leverage experience
gained from it to inform contributions to OSGi EEG requirements and
specification documents.
Just reading this paragraph my initial reaction is that this is very
much aligned with the Felix project. Felix's goals are basically to
provide a full OSGi implementation of both the framework and
compendium services whilst also providing a home for extensions to the
specification that make sense. In that sense Aries sounds like a
subset of Felix's goal, targetting the enterprise specifications.
The Aries project will deliver run-time componentry that supports
applications [...] The project is not expected to deliver a complete
application or
integration server runtime but will instead deliver enterprise
application componentry that can be integrated into such runtimes.
This makes a lot of sense. Any project building on a component
architecture should be setup in such a way that many of the individual
components can be combined and reused in different deployment scenarios.
There is currently no Apache project focussed
on OSGi enterprise applications that is independent from both the OSGi
framework
This is a really interesting topic, and others have commented on this:
the perception that bundles in the Felix project only run on Felix. Of
course anybody who makes an effort to understand OSGi quickly learns
that the whole purpose of the spec is to have bundles that can run on
any implementation and from years of experience of doing OSGi
projects, I must say that every project I did, did in fact use bundles
from Felix, Knopflerfish, Eclipse, Pax, various other sources as well
as project specific bundles.
My view is that we should really try to fix this misconception instead
of using it as a reason to start new projects.
For this reason we believe
Aries is a project whose community would be best served if it could
leverage but be independent from the communities that provide
underlying OSGi framework technology
If you look at the OSGi specification as a whole, it consists of two
parts: the framework and the compendium. In fact, with the different
expert groups, you could say there is more than one compendium as each
expert group usually adds a compendium of their own. Anyway, OSGi is
more than just the framework alone, and Felix already supplies an
implementation of the whole spec, so there currently is no community
that provide just the OSGi framework (also look at Knopflerfish and
Equinox, both of which also provide compendium implementations).
Relationships with Other Apache Projects
I know ACE is only in incubation, but is there a reason for not
mentioning it in this list? To me it makes sense to also consider
technology to deploy and update OSGi components and I think ACE could
fit in there nicely.
The incubator. Successful graduation from Incubator should result in
Aries becoming a new TLP.
As others mentioned, this is perhaps an issue that should be addressed
when leaving the incubator. As I explained above, my personal view is
that this would fit nicely within the Felix TLP, especially since
there seems to be a lot of focus on implementing the OSGi Enterprise
"compendium" which is part of the OSGi specifications. On the other
hand, if you guys really want to work outside of Felix then of course
that's an option too. I do think it's great that there is a group of
people wanting to implement these enterprise specs and explore related
options! Let's just try and leverage each others' work as much as
possible!
Greetings, Marcel
