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Freight Train

"Freight Train" - an unstoppable force that will change the way you think about service delivery.

The FT is best described as a refactoring of the Metro platform that leverages everything about Transit and Magic resulting in smaller, faster, smarter, and better. The process kicked off in Kuala Lumpur as a result of Steve and Niclas being locked in the same room for about a month, triggering some really interesting thinking, challenges, and generally good time.. Somewhere in this process, Peter, Niclas and I took time some time out on a secluded island somewhere in the South-China Sea during which the "Freight Train" name was born.

Six weeks into the process and a number of surprising things have happened. A working FT platform is already in-place in the DPML that is raising some very interesting questions. A description of the current Freight Train implementation includes information about FT build and runtime strategies, the approach taken concerning context management, new concepts concerning internal parts management, and new features such as identifiable instances.

Out of this is a set of observations concerning the FT development status. On one hand we have the effective disappearance of a framework in preference to a pattern driven approach, some rather interesting side-effects concerning management, some questions concerning the role of configuration and parameterization and who/what is actually responsible for this, and a few unanswered questions concerning semantic around execution strategies. Before leaping on the freight train its work looking through the list of obsavations and issues to get a better idea of where were are and what needs to be done.

While my own thoughts on the direction forward are somewhat mixed between the 'gentle transition' and the 'radical jump', I think that there are some concrete steps we can/should be taking. I'm looking forward to all of your thought and opinions as we move ahead on this.

Cheers, Steve.