Kevin,
Thanks for answer. Ok, so the situation looks exactly how Bill
presented it before - if we want something simple that works - we use
Platonos, if we want to invest time in the Modeler-as-platform, we
use an OSGi engine.
Considering what I've seen so far my vote is to stay simple, leaving
OSGi implementation to the "revolutionaries" [1] :-)
Andrus
[1] http://incubator.apache.org/learn/rules-for-revolutionaries.html
On Jul 27, 2006, at 12:47 PM, Kevin Duffey wrote:
>
>
> 1. Is Eclipse OSGi-compatible now, or is this just a future goal? For
> instance does it mean that if we write an OSGi Modeler plugin, can we
> deploy it in Eclipse, even if it is a separate Swing frame?
>
> Eclipse is an implementation of OSGi, but not a full implementation
> at least as of 3.1. Not sure if 3.2 brought it into full OSGi
> compliance, and if so, what version. I think OSGi v3 was released
> not too long ago while v4 is being worked on? The thing is,
> Eclipse, being so well supported, will indeed progress with more
> OSGi support, and is part of the consortium of OSGi I believe. This
> would mean that IF you wanted to use OSGi, I would say use the
> Eclipse plugin engine in its headless form. It is a bit more
> complicated to use than our engine, but you do gain OSGi and some
> other things that our engine will never be. I do not know the size
> of the Eclipse OSGi plugin engine, but I am guessing it's not too
> small.
>
>
> 2. What are the core differences between OSGI and Platonos (and
> corollary to that - is it possible to make Platonos a tight subset of
> OSGi, or are they totally incompatible).
>
>
> I am not an expert on OSGi, but OSGi as I recall allows for
> "bundles" where you generally place the plugin info in the
> manifest, its distributed as a .jar file, and so forth. Eclipse as
> I recall as of the 3.2 milestones was still allowing you to use
> plugin.xml to interconnect plugins, but was preferring to use the
> OSGi bundle/manifest format over their older plugin.xml.
>
> First off, with our engine we were not aiming to be an OSGi
> compatible engine primarily because of size, but also because our
> goal was to make something capable but simple. The Eclipse engine
> in the 2.x days (and probably prior) was genious. The notion of
> extension points and extensions was easy to grasp, and was a
> simple, effective yet powerful way to easily add dynamic plugins to
> an application of any type. I had worked on a couple of
> incarnations prior that were "similar" but never had a clear way of
> intersecting and making use of other plugins.
>
> We feel that our engine is very simple to use, yet offers similar
> flexibilities and power that the present OSGi compatible engines
> do. It takes nothing at all to copy/past a plugin.xml, and a few
> minutes to fill it out, as well as copy the base plugin lifecycle
> class (if you need one) and boom, you got a plugin. The same could
> probably be said for OSGi bundles, but my point is, its very simple
> to get going. Again our emphasis was on a small library that was
> effective and easy to use. I think we have established that. We
> have dozens of projects out there using our 1.0 engine, and others
> that started to use ours and went to Eclipse primarily for its RCP
> being ready to use.
>
> So, just to be clear, while Evert and I would love for you to use
> our engine and we believe within an hour or less you could be off
> and writing plugins for your app, we are not going to throw a fit
> if you decide otherwise. I just want to present to you as much as
> possible reasons you may decide to use our engine. Plus, we do
> answer emails quite quickly thus support the engine, and the work
> on the 2.0 engine is still going on, so we haven't abandoned the
> project, just not working on it as much these days due to time
> constraints with family/jobs. If you choose the Eclipse route,
> you'll get help on the Eclipse forums, but I am willing to bet it
> will be more complicated to get it integrated and learn the OSGi
> plugin format and such. It sounds like Felix is not really a good
> option if you ask me, given its status.
>
> Keep the questions coming, happy to answer. :)
>
> Thanks.
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