Excalibur potential

[Development Innova4j]

Hi Excalibur Team, I need to select a java framework for development new applications, in the past i worked with avalon/excalibur and my experience was very good. 

My questions are: The Excalibur project is open ? When a new version will be released ? What framework has more potential (future posibilities) Excalibur or Spring-Core ? Many thanks for their help.

[Carsten Ziegeler]

Development Innova4j wrote:
> Hi Excalibur Team, I need to select a java framework for development new
> applications, in the past i worked with avalon/excalibur and my
> experience was very good.
> My questions are: The Excalibur project is open ? When a new version
> will be released ? What framework has more potential (future
> posibilities) Excalibur or Spring-Core ? Many thanks for their help.
>
>
Hi,

the excalibur project does still exist and is of course available;
however there is not much activity here going on, so there are no new
features/improvements plant and there are no plans for releases.

If Excalibur fits your needs I don't see a reason why not to use it,
however other frameworks over much more functionality and are still in
active development, especially Spring of course.
You might want to have a look at the Avalon-Spring bridge from the
Apache Cocoon project. This allows you to use Avalon/Excalibur
configurations and components as Spring beans - which is very
interesting if you already have used Avalon in the past and want to
reuse your stuff in Spring.

HTH
Carsten

--
Carsten Ziegeler
cziegeler@...

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...

[Stefano Bagnara-2]

Carsten Ziegeler ha scritto:
> You might want to have a look at the Avalon-Spring bridge from the
> Apache Cocoon project. This allows you to use Avalon/Excalibur
> configurations and components as Spring beans - which is very
> interesting if you already have used Avalon in the past and want to
> reuse your stuff in Spring.

Hi Carsten,

in the JAMES project we also developed something similar to an
Avalon-Spring bridge. We most often call it a Spring based Avalon
container compatible with the Phoenix configuration.

It currently is 99% generic but at the moment is part of james main
source tree and includes a couple of things specific to james:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/james/server/trunk/spring-deployment/

I searched for Avalon-Spring bridge from cocoon but I didn't find much
information: can you give me more detail (links?).

Maybe we can merge the Avalon-Spring bridge efforts with Cocoon, and
maybe the avalon website should provide some information about the tool,
WDYT?

Stefano

PS: sorry for the crosspost to cocoon and james dev lists in CC, please
use the excalibur list for replies.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...

[Thomas Vandahl]

Stefano Bagnara wrote:

> Carsten Ziegeler ha scritto:
>> You might want to have a look at the Avalon-Spring bridge from the
>> Apache Cocoon project. This allows you to use Avalon/Excalibur
>> configurations and components as Spring beans - which is very
>> interesting if you already have used Avalon in the past and want to
>> reuse your stuff in Spring.
>
> Maybe we can merge the Avalon-Spring bridge efforts with Cocoon, and
> maybe the avalon website should provide some information about the tool,
> WDYT?

I thought Cocoon is going the OSGI way? I'd expect some kind of
Avalon-OSGI-Bridge then or am I mislead? Does such a thing exist? I
guess it would not be too difficult - using one of the "lighter" containers.

Bye, Thomas.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...

[Ralph Goers]

Thomas Vandahl wrote:
>
> I thought Cocoon is going the OSGI way? I'd expect some kind of
> Avalon-OSGI-Bridge then or am I mislead? Does such a thing exist? I
> guess it would not be too difficult - using one of the "lighter"
> containers.
>
Cocoon experimented with OSGi but tabled that in favor of just
converting from Avalon to Spring. The feeling was that once that was
done it wouldn't be too great a stretch to leverage Spring's OSGi
support for Cocoon blocks. No real work has started on that though, at
least to my knowledge.

Ralph

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...

[Carsten Ziegeler]

Stefano Bagnara wrote:

> Carsten Ziegeler ha scritto:
>> You might want to have a look at the Avalon-Spring bridge from the
>> Apache Cocoon project. This allows you to use Avalon/Excalibur
>> configurations and components as Spring beans - which is very
>> interesting if you already have used Avalon in the past and want to
>> reuse your stuff in Spring.
>
> Hi Carsten,
>
> in the JAMES project we also developed something similar to an
> Avalon-Spring bridge. We most often call it a Spring based Avalon
> container compatible with the Phoenix configuration.
>
> It currently is 99% generic but at the moment is part of james main
> source tree and includes a couple of things specific to james:
> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/james/server/trunk/spring-deployment/
>
> I searched for Avalon-Spring bridge from cocoon but I didn't find much
> information: can you give me more detail (links?).
>

Hi Stefano,

in Cocoon we directly use Spring which means we read the Avalon
configurations and add the components as beans to a Spring container. We
have a spring bean post processor for Avalon components which calls the
Avalon lifecycle methods like configure(), dispose() etc.

You'll find the code at:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cocoon/trunk/core/cocoon-sitemap/cocoon-sitemap-impl/src/main/java/org/apache/cocoon/core/container/spring/avalon

Now, currently the code is a little bit tied to Cocoon, but it shouldn't
be hard to separate this from Cocoon - this is still on the todo list
for Cocoon anyway :)
We use the spring xml mechanism and define own xml elements, so you
simply use something like
<avalon:bridge location="someconffile.xml"/>
I think there is more in the bridge like automatically loading
configurations from jar files if they're put at a specific location etc.
But I wrote this code too long ago to actually remember all the details :)

The bridge is using the Cocoon Spring Configurator which is a nice
extension to Spring (and not tied to Cocoon):
http://cocoon.apache.org/subprojects/configuration/1.0/spring-configurator/1.0/1304_1_1.html

> Maybe we can merge the Avalon-Spring bridge efforts with Cocoon, and
> maybe the avalon website should provide some information about the tool,
> WDYT?
>
Yes, I think this makes sense - imho it would make sense to separate
this stuff and perhaps host it at Excalibur.

Carsten
--
Carsten Ziegeler
cziegeler@...

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...

[Carsten Ziegeler]

Thomas Vandahl wrote:
>
> I thought Cocoon is going the OSGI way? I'd expect some kind of
> Avalon-OSGI-Bridge then or am I mislead? Does such a thing exist? I
> guess it would not be too difficult - using one of the "lighter"
> containers.
>
Hi Thomas,

Cocoon wanted to use OSGi for so long, but never made it :( As Ralph
pointed out, after we had the Avalon-Spring bridge and Spring dynamic
modules was announced, we thought that we get OSGi for free...well,
unfortunately Spring dynamic modules doesn't come for free and Cocoon
has messed up things like clear modularization in terms of packages used
by the various modules. This has to be cleaned up beforehand.
But afaik, there is noone working on this atm.

Carsten
--
Carsten Ziegeler
cziegeler@...

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...

[Siegfried Goeschl]

Hi folks,

following a similar integration path you can can also embed
fulcrum-yaafi (see
http://turbine.apache.org/fulcrum/fulcrum-yaafi/index.html) into Spring
to host Avalon services - fulcrum-yaafi is a light-weight Avalon
container to  be used as stand-alone container or embedded into other
containers (such as Spring).

Cheers

Siegfried Goeschl

PS: Since I developed fulcrum-yaafi this is not a completely objective
view ... :-)


Carsten Ziegeler wrote:

> Development Innova4j wrote:
>> Hi Excalibur Team, I need to select a java framework for development
>> new applications, in the past i worked with avalon/excalibur and my
>> experience was very good. My questions are: The Excalibur project is
>> open ? When a new version will be released ? What framework has more
>> potential (future posibilities) Excalibur or Spring-Core ? Many
>> thanks for their help.
>>
>>
> Hi,
>
> the excalibur project does still exist and is of course available;
> however there is not much activity here going on, so there are no new
> features/improvements plant and there are no plans for releases.
>
> If Excalibur fits your needs I don't see a reason why not to use it,
> however other frameworks over much more functionality and are still in
> active development, especially Spring of course.
> You might want to have a look at the Avalon-Spring bridge from the
> Apache Cocoon project. This allows you to use Avalon/Excalibur
> configurations and components as Spring beans - which is very
> interesting if you already have used Avalon in the past and want to
> reuse your stuff in Spring.
>
> HTH
> Carsten
>

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...

[Siegfried Goeschl]

Hi folks,

as a final proof that Avalon is not dead and thereby producing a variety
of incompatible solution :

http://people.apache.org/~sgoeschl/download/fulcrum-spring/

Of course, the implementation is only 99% generic because

+) some container-specific implementation details are needed there to
instantiate the YAAFI container and to set a parent ServiceManager to
lookup service from a parent container
+) the service lookup done to find an Avalon service from Spring and the
other way round is a soft dependency on the Avalon container being used

Having said that

+) is there some generic, valuable & reusable stuff from James, Cocoon
and Fulcrum?
+) if yes, any plans to move that out of the individual projects?
+) if yes, any plans to host the code base on Excalibur or Fulcrum?
+) and it is a good idea to provide some links from the Excalibur
homepage ... :-)

Cheers,

Siegfried Goeschl
 

Stefano Bagnara wrote:

> Carsten Ziegeler ha scritto:
>> You might want to have a look at the Avalon-Spring bridge from the
>> Apache Cocoon project. This allows you to use Avalon/Excalibur
>> configurations and components as Spring beans - which is very
>> interesting if you already have used Avalon in the past and want to
>> reuse your stuff in Spring.
>
> Hi Carsten,
>
> in the JAMES project we also developed something similar to an
> Avalon-Spring bridge. We most often call it a Spring based Avalon
> container compatible with the Phoenix configuration.
>
> It currently is 99% generic but at the moment is part of james main
> source tree and includes a couple of things specific to james:
> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/james/server/trunk/spring-deployment/
>
> I searched for Avalon-Spring bridge from cocoon but I didn't find much
> information: can you give me more detail (links?).
>
> Maybe we can merge the Avalon-Spring bridge efforts with Cocoon, and
> maybe the avalon website should provide some information about the
> tool, WDYT?
>
> Stefano
>
> PS: sorry for the crosspost to cocoon and james dev lists in CC,
> please use the excalibur list for replies.
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...
>
>
>

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@...