As mentioned, here are some more thoughts on Karaf audience/usage. Do you know how Karaf users consume/use Karaf? This is important to get a good release cycle and granularity. (as teased by JB on this list recently).
Why i am mentioning that? Well,i always felt that Karaf (the container) is a rather large thing with all its feature repos coming with it. I think thats why Karaf releases where coming rather slow in the past. (correct or not?) *1. Karaf as an opinionated felix distro* This "batteries" included feature is (was?) a core selling point of Karaf but is this really how people use it? I know at least two larger customers who are baking their own Karaf distribution anyway based on the minimal profile. So i am asking, wouldn't it make sense to release the "base" runtime (say Felix+Karaf infrastructure like pax-url, feature system, configuration system) independently? Similar to what you get with Karaf minimal. Depending on how Karaf is used in the real world (do you know?), here are some radical thoughts on my/our personal usage: - Karaf Minimal becomes "Karaf Runtime" because its base unit you can put everything on top (even at runtime). - Karaf Standard/Enterprise becomes the "Karaf SDK" since has the kitchen-sink nature that is great when you want to tinker with Spring,Hibernate etc. Also, wouldn't it make sense to release the maven-plugin independently? Those changes might seem of no importance to Karaf insiders (because you get all of that already when building your own distro) but at least I only found Karaf reasonable for a lot of usecases until i found out how to really only get the "runtime" part. Now i can say that for me Karaf is an opinionated felix distro (yes.. not only that but you get the point). *2. Karaf as polymorphic container* On the website Karaf is marketed as "Karaf can host any kind of applications: OSGi, Spring, WAR, and much more". Is that how people really use it? I mean.. are Spring (Boot..) people happy living inside Karaf? Every OSGi-savvy person recommends going DS, staying with OSGi spec standards and avoid War. - pun intended. Yeah, its great for demos but is it worth the effort? - also to keep this "working". And - from experience - i can tell that its also not a recommendable migration path. It sounds great but Hibernate and friends are actually quite hostile to your OSGi framework instance introducing a lot more complexity into your system. And if even OSGi-savvy people have problems troubleshooting such cases, how should a team of beginners do that? *3. Karaf as a better solution for Microservices* Guess i save this for another post, too easy to turn this into a rant. Let me just say: i think Karaf is one of the few answers to the pervasive Microservice/Spring Boot ecosystem. But it is not obvious and people stay away from it because. Again, this COULD go very long, but it is not the right place. Any thoughts? * What is Developer Ergonomics <https://medium.com/rebaze>**? * *www.rebaze.de <http://www.rebaze.de/> | www.rebaze.com <http://www.rebaze.com/> | @rebazeio <https://twitter.com/rebazeio>*
