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<h1>Equinox Project</h1><br>

 </p>


<h2>Introduction</h2>
<P align="center">
<font size="+2"><a href="/equinox" target="_top">This project has been moved. Please visit the
project home page.</a></font>
<P>

<p>The existing Equinox Technology project is to transition to be an <a href="/eclipse">Eclipse
    Project</a>. </p>


<h2>Background</h2>
<p>In mid-2003, while recovering from releasing Eclipse 2.1, the Eclipse Runtime
  team started to think of how to make Eclipse more dynamic. One of the drivers
  for this was the community push for Eclipse as a Rich Client Platform. A further
  driver was broadening the appeal of the Eclipse runtime infrastructure and
  leveraging existing standards and facilities. The team wanted to engage the
  community in the search for and investigation of
  new runtime technology for Eclipse. To support this, the Equinox Technology
project was created.</p>
<p>Equinox was set up as an incubator -- the first such project in Eclipse.
  As a separate project under the Technology PMC, the investigations were
  isolated from the main code and the entry barriers for interested parties
  lower. The output of the project was to either graduate into the main Eclipse
  code base or wither due to lack of interest. Having setup the project, the
  team proceeded to investigate various runtime component models (e.g., Avalon,
  OSGi,
  ...) and eventually settled
  on the OSGi framework as the most promising. In parallel, other team members
  looked at areas such as dynamic registry behavior.</p>
<p>By the end of 2003, the team had completed implementations of a dynamic registry
  and an OSGi R3 framework implementation (plus various extensions).
  As
  of Eclipse 3.0 M6, the original Eclipse Runtime was seamlessly replaced with
  a
  fully OSGi-based runtime. In June of 2004, Eclipse 3.0 shipped and thousands
  of people began running and shipping OSGi in their development environments
  and products!</p>
<p>The Equinox work did not end there. The team could have closed down the project
  as a raging success. Instead, "Phase 2" was started with a focus
  on security, framework layering and the like. Some of this work was subsequently
  absorbed into the main Eclipse OSGi framework and some continues
  today.</p>
<p>Similarly, the OSGi work did not stop. Several of the original Equinox
  committers became Platform Core committers and continued to work on the code.
  The team
    also worked closely with the OSGi Core Platform Experts Group (CPEG) to standardize
    the framework extensions (e.g., fragments, Require-Bundle) added to the Eclipse
  implementation in support of our expanded use cases. Much of this work
  is now exposed in the recent
  OSGi R4 framework
    specification
    draft and the OSGi Alliance has elected to use the Eclipse 3.1 OSGi implementation
  as their R4 specification reference implementation. The Eclipse team
  continues to be committed to OSGi as the base for
its runtime technology.</p>
<p>To go to the next level with OSGi, we need a community around OSGi
  and the framework implementation. The need for an independent OSGi implementation
  project
  at Eclipse was highlighted at the 2004 OSGi World Congress. It became apparent
  that the lack of a clear and obvious community rallying point was an inhibitor
  to people using our
  implementation and in fact, joining the community. Simple things such as the
  lack of an independent download, obvious mailing list or bug home were sending
  a signal that the
  Eclipse OSGi implementation was not standalone. In many ways, this
reflected reality but in others, the community and opportunities were there but
  not well advertised.</p>
<p>The need for such a community is further supported by the recent interest
  in OSGi, the specification and the technology. The  desire to use OSGi, and
  more generally a Java component model, is growing as evidenced
  by the emergence of groups such as the
  Apache Felix incubator
  project
  and JSR-277
  (Java
  Module System). People
  are still asking why Eclipse has not setup a community around its OSGi implementation.
  This proposal
  addresses
  that
  concern.</p>
<h2>Description</h2>


<h3>Proposal</h3>


<p>Concretely we propose to transition the Equinox Technology project to be an
  Eclipse project. The new Equinox Eclipse project will be the home of the OSGi
  community at Eclipse.org. As a peer of the Platform, JDT and PDE projects,
  the OSGi code will continue
to be managed by the Eclipse PMC and ship with the Eclipse project major releases. </p>
<p>This setup provides the needed infrastructure (mailing lists etc), retains
  the linkage to the Platform (as OSGi is a key element there) and provides a
  plausible,
  visible rallying point for an OSGi community at Eclipse. Creating a top-level
  project is another option but this option seems like additional overhead
  for no apparent gain (it is unclear that people readily distinguish between
projects and subprojects).</p>
<p>Why move Equinox? Why not create a new subproject? There are several reasons. </p>
<ul>
  <li>It is a natural evolution of the project. It was originally setup as an
    incubator. It produced content that was eventually consumed by the Platform
    project. This was a success. That content is now more globally interesting
    so we can use Equinox, the project that originally produced it, to carry
  it forward even further.</li>
  <li>There is already some level of brand recognition with people referring
  to the "Equinox OSGi implementation". </li>
  <li> Most of the  infrastructure is already in place.</li>
  <li> The
  name is cool.</li>
</ul>
<p>What of the other work in Equinox? Equinox was the first technology incubator
    project. It was put in place before we had the ability to invite others to
    join existing projects for speculative work. The need to bring in others
    but not give them full commit rights was one of the key motivators in spawning
    a Technology project. Since then we have several cases where people have
    been invited to join ongoing work with less than full commit rights. This
    is the
    vision for the new Equinox. The current team working in the various workareas
  will move to an incubator area of the rehosted Equinox. Nothing will change
  for
    them other than the repo location, mailing list name, etc.</p>
<h3>Project Scope </h3>


<p>The new Equinox will be open to:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Implementation of all aspects of the OSGi specification (including the
    MEG and VEG work)</li>
  <li>Investigation and research related to future versions of OSGi specifications
    and related runtime issues</li>
  <li>Non-standard infrastructure deemed to be essential to the running and management
    of OSGi-based systems </li>
  <li>Key framework services and extensions
      needed for running Eclipse (e.g., the Eclipse Adaptor, Extension registry)
    and deemed generally useful to people using OSGi.</li>
</ul>
<p>As such, the  OSGi framework implementation previously developed in Equinox
and now hosted in the Platform project will move back to Equinox for further
  development and maintenance.</p>
<p>The new Equinox will not undertake development of the Eclipse Runtime function
  such as Jobs, Preferences and Content Types. This will remain part of the Platform
  project. This furthers the vision of Eclipse as a landscape of OSGi bundles
  rather than calling out particular bundles as "OSGi" and others as Eclipse.
  That is, a large (and increasing) number of Eclipse plug-ins can be run on
  any OSGi framework -- there is no particular value in cluttering Equinox
  with unrelated content.</p>
<h2>Organization</h2>
<p>The project will be structured into the following components:</p>
<dl>
  <dt><strong>framework</strong></dt>
  <dd>The implementation of the OSGi core framework specification. Work in this
    component also includes various adaptors and related mechanisms in support
    of successfully running an OSGi based system.</dd>
  <dt><strong>services</strong></dt>
  <dd>The implementation of other OSGi standard services and facilities. This
    component may also contain some additional (i.e., non-standard) mechanisms
    if they are deemed to be generally and widely applicable or interesting.</dd>
  <dt><strong>incubator</strong></dt>
  <dd>Research and prototyping of new techniques and approaches relating to OSGi
    and componentized runtimes in general. </dd>
</dl>
<p>Each of these components will have a developer mailing list, a team website,
  a bugzilla component and other infrastructure as appropriate. Equinox will
  have just one newsgroup to host the user community. For now, separate newsgroups
  would fragment the discussion too much. This point can be revisited if the
  message volume gets unwieldy.</p>
<p>The Equinox repository will be structured as follows:</p>
<ul>
  <li>The current Equinox repository artifacts will be moved to
      an equinox-incubator area in the Eclipse project repository and retain
    their current structure and history.</li>
  <li>The new project will continue to use the flat structure of the
      Eclipse project repository. Again, this avoids issues of relatively arbitrary
      categorization and puts the standard Eclipse plug-ins on par with new and
    existing bundles.</li>
  <li>The org.eclipse.osgi bundle will not be renamed or moved nor
      will the code (i.e., packages) it contains.</li>
</ul>
<h2 align="left">Proposed project lead and initial committers</h3>


<p>The current Platform Runtime committers will be
  grandfathered as full Equinox committers. Current Equinox committers will be
  grandfathered as committers in the new Equinox Incubator area. The project
  as a whole will continue to be led by Jeff McAffer, IBM.</p>
<h2 align="left">Interested parties</h3>


<p>The submitters of this proposal welcome interested parties to post to the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology">eclipse.technology</a> newsgroup
  and ask to be added to the list as interested parties or to suggest changes
  to this document. </p>


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