On Thursday 22 July 2004 13:14, David Leangen wrote: > Until now, I had thought that Avalon and Merlin necessarily worked > together. Can one actually use Avalon without a component container like > Merlin?
Well, that depends on what you mean by "use". There are stuff in Avalon Framework that can be used completely without any container. But more importantly, there are other containers than Merlin. Basically, Avalon started out with Excalibur Component Manager (ECM) as the first container, and Cocoon being the first and most important "user". Later Phoenix was built in parallel to deal with Avalon in a 'stand-alone' fashion. We could call these the first generation containers. Fortress was initially developed as an interim solution for an easy migration path for ECM users. Merlin took some ideas from Phoenix, but also had the ambition to integrate all the approaches into a single container. The many people working on different containers have had a big problem to agree on exactly how such convergence of the 4 containers should look like. Five main things happened over a period of 1.5 - 2 years; * ECM was deprecated * Phoenix was deprecated, but forked into Loom and the developers went to codehaus.org * A 'Single Unified Platform' vote was cast and passed earlier this year. Merlin was considered the reference platform, and work started on filling the contract holes that existed. * Friction still remained, and both a "Excalibur TLP" (Fortress-based) and a Merlin TLP was proposed, but the higher ranking ASF folks thought that was too much, and said an Excalibur TLP was ok (and formed) but Merlin-proponents should continue with the 'Single Unified Platform' (SUP) that the community had decided on. * The recent site layout change exposed many subtle complimentary changes of Avalon in line (we thought) with the SUP, but the Excalibur people felt that this was completely unacceptable, and a massive debate rised at all kinds of levels, technical, personal, 'legal' and other. I.e. The active Avalon committers (esp. myself & Stephen) was not considered good guardians of the Avalon Legacy and have failed to co-operate with Excalibur folks. In my book, the old in-fighting just remained, but over two projects instead of within one. I have tried to keep this rendition of history as objective as possible, but please note that I have been part of this process, and therefor biased, some way or the other. > In any case, my opinion is that it's important to get the infighting over > with as quickly as possible. I think everyone are in agreement with this, and have been so for the last couple of years, but obviously unable to stop it. > A few healthy academic discussions are > necessary from time to time, but it sounds like things have degenerated > beyond that. Yes it has. I think Merlin is a great platform with enormous potential if nutured correctly. We just want to get on doing that, with the feedback of the users. Cheers Niclas -- +------//-------------------+ / http://www.bali.ac / / http://niclas.hedhman.org / +------//-------------------+ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
