Revamping Cornerstone Registry with OSGi?

We should explore using Eclipse's OSGi implementation. One con is the jar is big (almost 800KB). The open source implementation Oscar also seems to be big (>700KB). The Knopflerfish implementation has a 200KB option which is not bad. So do we need the full glofy of OSGi?

Java Plugin Framework

One interesting project to watch: Java Plugin Framework.

The So Called OOB Experience

Cisco uses Salesforce.com. Although I work in Cisco IT, I don't know much about that project at all apart from that it exists. Today CNET has an article about it that I quote here:

Further, JMP contends that Cisco's IT department has "struggled to integrate these tools with a hosted application and is questioning the logic of a having such a heavily customized hosted application."

Well, shall we give up on the so called OOB (out of box, or is it rather out of body?) experience already? The handful of ERP/CRM implementations that I have seen, whether Oracle, Siebel or Salesforce.com, are all heavily customized. You see constant struggles between the vendor (who says no customization or else you are on your own) and the customer. Cornerstone Framework's customization feature were designed to ease that pain and let both parties to settle on a practical middle ground: yes, you can customize because it's easy and can be preserved over upgrades.

Quote of the Day

Saw this quote today and love it:

Nothing great has ever been accomplished without irrational exuberance.

We did that at Cisco in various groups and failed miserably. I certainly thought we took the responsibility. That's why I switched from "It's so great that ..." to "Just do it!". The more I think about it, the more I can see we were in the wrong place :).

Howard Would Reboot with Cornerstone

Howard Lewis Ship of Tapestry and HiveMind fame said this when commenting on Wicket (BTW, why would someone use this kind of name for their project?):

Mostly, I'm envious of the chance to start with a clean slate. The demand for backwards compatibility is surely holding me back from fixing a good number of things. And if I was starting again today, I would not require subclassing from base classes (as Tapestry and Wicket both require). It really would be POJOs, plug optional interfaces and naming conventions (and maybe annotations) ... and no XML at all.

Guess what, Cornerstone has had all of the above already (in fact, from day one) :).

Cost of Cornerstone Framework

Read Raible Designs post about its cost according to Koders. Cornerstone Framework has roughly 28,000 lines of code, about half the size of Tapestry. So it costs around $140,000 to develop. Again according to Koders. I don't know what formula they use. But it's a good thing to attach a dollar figure to an open source project.