Aehso’s Output

SOA-based development tool interoperability

On the AccuRev homepage they state:

AccuRev supports open standards and SOA-based development tool interoperability across Microsoft Windows, Linux, and UNIX platforms.

(emphasis mine)
I have to admit, this piqued my interest (actually my initial reaction was ‘wtf?’ but I digress).  Searching to figure out what SOA-based development tool interoperability is, I am now guessing that this is a reference to the Eclipse ALF (incubating) project.  ALF is a CruiseControl type framework that integrates various commercial SCM repositories, build management, testing and code scanning tools etc. via a BPEL-based orchestrations that control the overall “Application Lifecycle Framework”.

Unfortunately, ALF appears to be getting no love from the big players, which is a bit of a shame as we could all do with something a bit more sophisticated than CruiseControl+Ant for integrating and controlling large scale builds.  A Web Services API integration is, I think, a valid way to tie these types of systems together.  

After reviewing the ALF demos, I am actually a little surprised that the entire scope of what ALF is trying to achieve is managed under the Eclipse.org umbrella.  I can see a place for an ALF tools project in Eclipse.org certainly but I am surprised that the whole ALF server-side architecture appears to be being designed and developed in the same project.  I really don’t really see the connection between Eclipse.org and the design or implementation of service interfaces like the ALF Event Manager WSDL.  Projects like STP and WTP for example work to integrate with open standards like SCA and JEE but ALF does not seem to have that type of clear seperation between tools and target runtime implementation. 

Perhaps I am missing something but a recent interesting discussion on the eclipse.technology.alf newsgroup (Subject: Upcoming validation release review) raised these and other related concerns about the scope and deliverables of this project seems to re-enforce this observation.  It will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

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