Monday, 21 April 2008

What ever happened to ICEfaces EPS?

From time-to-time there is a forum post or other inquiry asking about the ICEfaces Enterprise Production Suite (EPS) and how it relates to the open-source ICEfaces project. A fair amount of confusion has been caused by the migration of the EPS features from a commercial product offering into the open-source ICEfaces project. To clear that up I though a quick history of the EPS product may be useful.

Just to make it absolutely clear right off the top, while the EPS started life as a commercial product offering, since July, 2007 (ICEfaces 1.6) the major features that constituted the EPS have been freely available under the open-source MPL license.

ICEfaces 1.0 (May, 2006) was released under the ICEfaces Community License, which was absolutely free to use and deploy, but was not open-source. This remained true for all versions prior to the inaugural open-source release of ICEfaces 1.5 in November of 2006. So all ICEfaces versions prior to 1.5 were Community License, and all versions 1.5 and greater have been under the open-source Mozilla Public License (MPL).

In addition to the free Community Edition of ICEfaces there was also an Enterprise Production Suite (EPS) product that had to be commercially licensed and used in conjunction with the free-to-use ICEfaces 1.0 and 1.1 libraries. The EPS added the following additional capabilities to the standard ICEfaces product:

  • - More sophisticated asynchronous connection management and recovery, including the ice:outputConnectionStatus component.
  • - Support for deploying ICEfaces asynchronous apps. in a cluster, incl. detailed configuration instructions, etc.
  • - Improved asynchronous resource utilization and scalability via the stand-alone ICEfaces Asynchronous HTTP Server (AHS).
  • - A Broadcast Render Manager API that added the ability to easily broadcast asynchronous updates across application sessions on different nodes in a cluster, or across different applications.

When ICEfaces 1.5 was released under an open-source license in Nov. of 2007, it was still possible to license the EPS under a commercial license and use it with ICEfaces 1.5.

Beginning with the ICEfaces 1.6 release in July of 2007, EPS as a commercial product was withdrawn and most of the key features that were originally provided in the EPS edition were added into the core ICEfaces code-base under the open-source license, including the enhanced asynchronous connection management features and support for clustered deployments. The Asynchronous HTTP Server (AHS) was offered as a separate project on ICEfaces.org, also under MPL open-source license.

As of ICEfaces 1.7 (April, 2008) the AHS server has been moved into the core ICEfaces project as it has become a key component in the ICEfaces portlet configuration. The stand-alone ICEfaces AHS project is now dormant as future work will be done on the AHS facility that is part of the core ICEfaces repository.

The Broadcast Renderer is the one remaining element of the original EPS product that has not yet shown up in the open-source ICEfaces product. However, plans are in place to add this capability for ICEfaces 1.7.1.

In summary:

  • - The Enterprise Production Suite (EPS) was a commercially licensed product that worked with ICEfaces 1.0 - 1.5 to offer enhanced robustness, performance, and scalability for large-scale asynchronous deployments.
  • - With ICEfaces 1.6 (July 4th, 2007), the commercial EPS product was withdrawn from the market and the key features it provided were contributed to the open-source ICEfaces project.
  • - As of ICEfaces 1.7.1 (Est. May, 2008), the last missing EPS feature, the Broadcast Render Manager, will be added to the core ICEfaces libraries.
I hope this helps clear up any confusion that may have been caused by the gradual migration of the EPS features into ICEfaces proper over the last few releases. The good news is that those features that once constituted a commercial product offering have all been contributed into the open-source ICEfaces project, further strengthening ICEfaces' support for large scale asynchronous deployments.

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Posted by ken.fyten at 11:12 AM in Entries by Ken Fyten

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