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Posted to scm@excalibur.apache.org by le...@apache.org on 2004/07/08 13:07:12 UTC
svn commit: rev 22704 - excalibur/trunk/site/xdocs
Author: leosimons
Date: Thu Jul 8 04:07:10 2004
New Revision: 22704
Modified:
excalibur/trunk/site/xdocs/index.xml
Log:
Updated description
Modified: excalibur/trunk/site/xdocs/index.xml
==============================================================================
--- excalibur/trunk/site/xdocs/index.xml (original)
+++ excalibur/trunk/site/xdocs/index.xml Thu Jul 8 04:07:10 2004
@@ -26,6 +26,60 @@
<section name="What is excalibur?">
+ <p>
+ Excalibur is an <a href="http://www.opensource.org/">open source</a> software
+ project of <a href="http://www.apache.org/">The Apache Software Foundation</a>.
+ Our primary product is a lightweight, embeddable
+ <a href="http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html">Inversion of Control</a>
+ <em>container</em> named <a href="fortress/index.html">Fortress</a> that is written
+ in <a href="http://java.sun.com/">java</a>.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Inversion of control, also known as the hollywood principle ("don't call us,
+ we'll call you") is a simple put powerful concept. The idea is that we
+ don't "wire up" all the pieces that make up an application (the "components") by
+ writing lots of this-component-uses-that-one-like-so code, nor do we use some
+ kind of lookup directory (like
+ <a href="http://java.sun.com/products/jndi/">JNDI</a>, for example) where each component
+ decides what components to interact with itself. Instead, we instruct a smart piece
+ of software, the container, to <em>tell</em> the components how to interact.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Fortress (and also its predecessor, "ECM") is such a container. It is
+ <em>lightweight</em>, by which we mean that it doesn't need a lot of resources,
+ take a lot of disk or memory, or impose all sorts of demans on its environment. Fortress
+ is also <em>embeddable</em>, by which we mean that you can use fortress inside just
+ about every java environment. More concretely, you can use it as the basis of a
+ large standalone development platform (like the
+ <a href="http://www.keelframework.org/">Keel</a> project), at the core of a
+ servlet-based web application (like
+ <a href="http://cocoon.apache.org/">Cocoon</a>) or even as the basis of a GUI
+ application (like
+ <a href="http://projects.d-haven.org/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?cid=2&lid=2">GuiApp</a>).
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Fortress knows how to manage components that have been developed using a
+ rigid <em>lifecycle</em> contract called
+ <a href="http://wiki.apache.org/excalibur/AvalonFramework">Avalon-Framework</a>.
+ In the next upcoming release, fortress will also be able to manage ordinary
+ javabeans, and support for other kinds of Inversion of Control are planned.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Besides providing fortress, excalibur also provides a small library of very
+ useful <a href="http://excalibur.apache.org/component-list.html">components</a>.
+ We also distribute some of the libraries used to build fortress (and some
+ other containers) seperately. This selection of libraries is called
+ <a href="http://excalibur.apache.org/containerkit.html">containerkit</a>.
+ </p>
+
+ </section>
+
+ <section name="So why is excalibur an interesting project?">
+
<p>Here's a few partial answers.</p>
<p>
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