Re: Avalon ... Metro ?

Niclas Hedhman wrote:

> On Monday 18 October 2004 06:23, Morten Haavaldsen wrote:
> 
> 
>>regardless name, strange since I got the impression from the new look on
>>Avalon website that it was here to stay?
> 
> 
> The 'commericial look' of the Avalon site, was possibly the last nail in the 
> coffin. It triggered an uproar of emotions from powerful ASF members, and 
> resulted in the actual downfall of Avalon as a project.

No.  It had nothing to do with the commercial look of the site and 
everything to do with the Merlin developers refusal to support Framework 
4.x as a separate "product" or even allow other Avalon developers to do 
so.  It tiggered an uproar of emotions from _AVALON_ users and _AVALON_ 
developers who had tried to give the Merlin team every chance to 
"reinvent" Avalon as long as they continued to properly support existing 
users.  When they showed they were unwilling to do so and would fight 
anyone else willing to do so, that's when the last nail was struck.  It 
was due to a lack of respect on the part of the Merlin developers 
towards anyone with any other ideas or thoughts about Avalon, despite 
Merlin not being the original Avalon project.

Obviously some of us have differences of opinion about this matter.



> YES! You got it all right. Outside of J2EE we basically have 3 main efforts;
> 1. Pico - essentially design pattern around injection of dependencies in 
> constructors. Metro is working towards supporting Pico-developed components.

Pico isn't really appropriate for large server apps.  That is, of course 
you could use it, but you don't get much out of the box.  You'd probably 
rather use NanoContainer or MicroContainer both of which are based on 
Pico, written by the same developers, and both still under heavy 
development.  See http://picocontainer.org

> 2. Sprint - nice framework which essentially focus on 'apparent features' for 
> enterprise developers. I have two problems with it, JavaBeans (which 
> essentially is what they are prescribing) has the nasty habit of never 
> knowing when they are initialized. Secondly, it doesn't bother about 
> classloading management, which I think is essential to build 24/7 servers.

I think you mean Spring: http://springframework.org

Spring is probably the most popular choice currently.  I personally am 
not that crazy about it.

> 3. Avalon-Merlin turned Metro. Strong focus on application Model, classloading 
> management, integrated build system and flexible runtime. It is a platform 
> that is easy to extend, and we are expected to support both Pico and Spring 
> components in the not so distant future.

There is also:

Avalon Excalibur: http://excalibur.apache.org.  Hosts the original 
Avalon framework and the Fortress container which is appropriate for 
server development.  I use Fortress quite a bit myself.

Codehaus Loom: http://loom.codehaus.org.  Loom is based on Avalon 
Phoenix and is a stable, ready to use server micro-kernel.  You should 
definitely check it out.

There's also Jakarta Hivemind which isn't a whole server framework but 
could be used like PicoContainer.  You can also use the core of Apache 
Geromino or JBoss to launch customer JMX components as a server.


>>One important aspect often forgotten is to have an example on how to
>>instrument(e.g. JMX?) the solution  as well...

Excalibur hosts an Instrumentation library that is used in Fortress.

jaaron