starter controls

[Mike Foster <mf...@bea.com>]

Hi everyone,

I've been wanting to wait until after ApacheCon to propose this, what with everything else going on.  But it looks like there might be some other noise going on in ControlHaus (cool stuff Dan) and we probably need to solve this now.

BEA has some controls code from WLW 8.1 that we would like to donate to the community and continue development on in 9.0.  These are the starter controls that are included in the box in WLW 8.1.  I've been spending a few weeks internally (in BEA) tracking down use cases and trying to find the most generally useful ones that will provide value in the base Beehive distribution.  So, I'm proposing this:

BEA would like to donate the code and continue development for the following controls in ControlHaus.  They will be container independent implementations:

DB Control
Web Service Control
EJB Control
JMS Control

ControlHaus makes sense for this development, because I see it as a place where we can grow the control authoring community, and we need to "seed" that with something real and useful.  

With that said, I also think these controls are useful in the base Beehive distribution, so I'd like to propose the creation of a couple of "ControlPacks" in ControlHaus that get pulled into a distribution similar to the way Tomcat gets pulled in.  In fact, I'd argue that controls as an ease-of-use programming model just isn't that compelling without a set of starter controls to use.  So, the distribution would look like this:

ControlHaus -
	starter-cp.jar (DB Control and Web Service Control).  This is the most generally useful set and really solidifies our SOA story.
	j2ee-cp.jar (EJB Control and JMS Control).  Note, these don't rely on a J2EE container locally, and can call out remotely to a J2EE server -- they have interesting Tomcat use-cases.

Beehive distribution -
	lib/
		controls/
		starter-cp.jar (pulled from ControlHaus)
		j2ee-cp.jar (pulled from ControlHaus)
			runtime/
			controls.jar

The StarterControlPack and J2EEControlPack would be two separate projects in ControlHaus.  

Let's kick this around a bit, and if this sounds good to everyone, I'd also like to write up some ideas about versioning and certifying the controls Beehive ships as well.

Thanks,

Mike