Design principles

The problems of current forges are mainly due to high coupling between components. Our approach is to apply Service Oriented Architecture [SOA] principles to the forge design. Loose coupling of SOA must reduce maintenance costs and improve forge evolution. Loose coupling allows to externalize resource hosting to forge partners. It means that the forge does not include final resources but only manage references on external resources. This design principle does not prevent a forge provider to deploy a forge as now, but a forge provider can also compose on-line collaborative services provided by other partners.
The idea of the next generation forge is represented in figure below.

User management is now externalized. Authentication has to be provided by authentication providers. The scope of the forge does not include external tools. External tools are wrapped into services that can be hosted at remote sites. The forge is also a service and thus, the user interface is not part of the forge. Web application or heavy client (such as eclipse or netbeans) just issue requests on the forge to build views on projects.

The kernel of the forge includes the following internal components:

• Abstract service interfaces. This is a way to expose the API of the forge. Abstract services call internal components and then call external tools.
• Access control which checks and manages security policies.
• Binding
• Notification
• Indexation

The middle layer manages abstract users and projects and send events to the end-point services.
There is only notification between the forge and end point services of the forge. The forge notifies on a queue. The service providers subscribe to the topic.

Forge API

The API is under definition (javadoc format). You can access the current version here.

Implementation choices

• Security: JAAS over WS-security
• Message oriented implementation: Jboss-MQ
• EJB3: JBoss container

Have a look at the SCA implementation prototype .

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