Hello,
On 12 nov. 2015, at 07:54, Jean-Baptiste Onofré <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
I already discussed with some of you about my plan on Karaf marketing.
I think clearly that we had a great project, a great team, a great tool, but
we're not really good in term of promotion and marketing.
Yes Karaf is clearly one of the hidden gems of the ASF, and if marketing it
properly can make it more visible and people understand it’s value better,
everybody wins.
Especially, we have to be clear in the message and the projects that we
deliver. For instance, again, I'm sure that karaf-boot is a huge step forward
in Karaf adoption. I'm not sure that all users are aware and know the purpose
of Cellar, Cave, Decanter, and even some Karaf areas.
Yes, and at the same time positioning Karaf as compatible with lots of
technologies would help. For example tell everyone that they can realize their
projects in Karaf that use Spring technologies would be helpful, not making
them have to choose between Karaf or Spring, but rather just use Karaf as the
runtime and build on top of it using Spring librairies. Of course this requires
that we provide features for all of these.
In order to improve the Karaf marketing area, I would like to propose the
following plan:
1. More professional website
I think we have to improve both the content and the look'n feel of the website.
In term of content, I think it makes sense to not emphasize on OSGi. The fact that Karaf
runs OSGi is not really interesting for most of end users (of course, it is for
advanced/power users). We have to explain that Karaf is modern and multi-purpose
container. More over, with karaf-boot, it becomes also a bootstrapper and "run
anywhere" paradigm platform.
So, I started a new website, changing the look'n feel (to give a more
professional shape) and the content (changing the marketing message):
http://maven.nanthrax.net/goodies/karaf/site/
Looks really good, there are a few images that have resizing issues but that’s
a detail. One message I also repeat often about Karaf is that it’s the basic
runtime you would end up with if you started a project from scratch, so why not
use that as a start instead of re-implementing it.
Also, at JavaOne Oracle was talking about Jigsaw a lot, so maybe we can
capitalize on this by saying that this is a module system that is proven and
future-ready. I like the enterprise positioning, clearly in opposition of
not-yet-ready-for-production platforms such as docker or in some regards
Spring-boot :)
I will complete the website today (some cleanup, other pages than the home one,
etc), but it already gives you an idea.
2. New guides/documentation
I'm working on the improvement in term of content of the documentation.
Especially, the dev guide will be more straight forward, providing recipes for
users.
All guides will use asciidoc now. You can already see the kind of output on the
Decanter guide:
http://karaf.apache.org/manual/decanter/latest-1/index.html
All Karaf guides (and subprojects) will be rendered in a popup using such
look'n feel.
Looks good but it would be fantastic if it was also responsive so that it can
be used on tablets and or phablets :)
3. Meetups
I plan to organize a Karaf Meetup beginning of 2016. I have some sponsors in
mind. The purpose is to meet most of Karaf users, devs, and enthusiasts.
I will give you more details soon.
Sounds fantastic. If you need help with the sponsoring I could try to talk to
people here.
Thoughts ?
Love the approach, the old website really needed revamping, and this is
definitely a great step forward !
cheers,
Serge…
