Remembering the Future

What is Avalon? "Avalon" is the code name for the presentation subsystem in "Longhorn." Avalon provides the foundation for building applications and high fidelity experiences in Longhorn, blending together application UI, documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of your computer. The functionality extends to the support for Tablet and other forms of input, a more modern imaging and printing pipeline, accessibility and UI automation infrastructure, data-driven UI and visualization, as well as the integration points for weaving the application experience into the Windows shell. . . . See how Longhorn-targeted Avalon applications will mix XAML, which is tightly integrated with the Avalon class library, and programming code. What is it? Apache Avalon provides a complete platform for component programming including a core framework, utilities, tools, components and containers. By using key design patterns such as Inversion of Control (IoC) and Seperation of Concerns (SoC), Avalon achieves a number of advantages over traditional object oriented programming frameworks: No implementation lock Low coupling between components Component lifecycle management Configuration management and easy to use API Component meta-data framework and tools Service dependecy management Embeddable containers for standalone, J2EE and web environments In Component Oriented Programming (COP), reusable and replaceable components can be assembled in a container to provide application blocks. Blocks in turn can be used to build anything from a client desktop application to an FTP server to a web service. Avalon provides a variety of basic components and default application blocks in order to help you quickly build your own application solution. Given this, the Avalon team aims to: Provide a stable COP development platform (currently in JAVA) Create a rich set of client components API's and default implementations Develop complete container solutions Explore and extend COP development practices