The History and Future of Inversion of Control

What is excalibur?

I'll give a few partial answers.

good code. Code that comes from the mature avalon project (everything that used to be branded as "Avalon Excalibur" and "Avalon Fortress"). This includes two lightweight Inversion of Control containers. One of these powers, among other things, Cocoon. The other ("fortress") is the basis of projects like Keel. Excalibur also includes powerful and mature reusable "components" and "libraries", handling tasks ranging from thread management to component pooling to (URI-and-similar-) source resolving.

smart developers. Here's the list of initial committers (with, in parenthesis, a very much incomplete sampling of some of the other open source projects these people are currently active in):

Most of these people are or have been active in the avalon project in various roles. Several of them are apache members. Together they have loads and loads experience under their belts related to inversion of control development. In fact, I'm confident to say this list includes some of the biggest experts on inversion-of-control-style container development.

exciting community. Several open source and commercial projects (both at apache and elsewhere) depend on and contribute to the excalibur project. A strong team of enthousiastic developers (with strong ties to several other projects in the same problem domain) has various big and small plans with excalibur. One of the leading open source organisations in the world, The Apache Software Foundation, is hosting the project, providing insight, advice, infrastructure, legal backing, a time- and battle-proven development process, and much more.

I'm very exited that I've been giving the oppurtunity and trust to act as chair of the excalibur project management committee (and the even fancier title of "Vice President, Excalibur" does have a nice ring to it ;). I could go on ranting about all the cool new stuff that is no doubt going to happen, but there's some things that need doing first right now.

More info?

This project is just getting started, so all the exiting stuff is happening on the mailing lists. In the meantime, if you want to get an idea of what all this is about, download a copy of avalon-fortress (some old docs here). For people not into "hardcore IoC development", a more gentle way to get in touch with a lot of things excalibur provides would be to read one of the introductory articles to Keel, which uses the Excalibur Fortress container at its base. A list of keel articles can be found on the keel wiki.