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From: Dain Sundstrom <dain@iq80.com>
Subject: Re: [vote] XBean donation
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 10:50:50 -0800
To: dev@geronimo.apache.org

On Jan 27, 2006, at 1:11 PM, Aaron Mulder wrote:

> +1
>
> I assume this will just be a regular subproject at present.  If one of
> the XBean folks could talk a little about how XBean could ultimately
> be adopted by Geronimo (the app server), that would be great.  I think
> we talked about ways that Geronimo and XBean could move to close the
> gap and thus eventually make it possible to for Geronimo to adopt
> XBean without it being such a massive change, but I'm a little fuzzy
> on the details.
>
> Thanks,
>     Aaron

You're a bit fuzzy on the detail because every is a bit fuzzy. I have  
a few idea about how to integrate the code, but we're not going to  
know exactly how the integration will work or if we want to do it at  
all until we try.  Just wanted to drop a warning before jumping into  
my ideas.

XBean has several modules most of which are designed for direct XBean  
users like Service-Mix, ActiveMQ and XFire, so I'm going to only  
address the kernel and server module.

The kernel in XBean has a very light weight kernel compared to the  
Geronimo kernel.  For example, the Geronimo kernel directly supports  
object name queries, and in XBean name querying is an optional  
service.  The other big difference is the code is just easier to  
follow :)  *If* we decide to switch to the XBean kernel, we can  
easily create an implementation of the current Geronimo kernel  
interface that simply calls through to the XBean kernel.  I had this  
working with the XBean 1.0 kernel, but haven't written a bridge for  
the 2.0 kernel yet.

The server module is more tricky.  The server module contains  
simplified start up code, support for spring based configurations and  
some experimental class loaders.  All of these will take work to  
determine if they are beneficial to Geronimo and if so, how to  
integrate them with out breaking current users.  I think that more  
importantly than integrating the code is integrating the ideas in the  
server module.  For example, the startup code in XBean would allow us  
to eliminate the serialized object graph in the our startup jars,  
which contain important attributes that we can't edit.

-dain