Within Avalon there has been a number of container solutions. This reflects a historical divergence and a present convergence within the area of containment technology within Avalon. The original containment solutions ECM and Phoenix focussed on very different approaches to component management. The ECM model dealt with primarily pooled objects used in environments such as Cocoon. The Phoenix model dealt with a strict singleton model supporting project such as James. Further developments resulted in the release of Fortress and Merlin. Fortress replaced the ECM solution and was positioned as a migration vehicle for components to move towards Avalon's latest container - Merlin. The Merlin container is an attempt at being a flexible and adaptive container that leverages a set of common containment facilities, equally suited for embedded and stand-alone use.
The Avalon community went into an identity crisis, and was struggling to support multiple containers. This also lead to decision paralysis and community division. In March 2004, the community finally pulled itself together and made the historic vote to forge forward with a Single Platform, and only Merlin fits the bill of being that platform.
Below is the list of legacy containers. Avalon recommend that new users only invest time in Merlin, the only sustainable solution. ECM and Fortress will be partially supported during a transition period, but eventually taken out of Avalon completely. Users who are interested in Phoenix and that can't use Merlin, can investigate if the Loom project can be of any assistance.
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Fortress contains a framework to help you create your own avalon containers. It boasts asynchronous management of your component instances, high scalability, easier maintenance of your code, and easy embedding into various environments like servlet engines. |
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This package contains the ExcaliburComponentManager (ECM). ECM has been deprecated in favour of the new Fortress container. |
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Phoenix, see Loom project |
Phoenix is a micro-kernel designed and implemented on top of the Avalon framework. It provides a number of facilities to manage the environment of Server Applications. Such facilities include log management, classloading, thread management and security. |
