Hi,
at the company I work, I am currently involved in a project where we are
using a home-grown OSGi-based server on which we deploy our applications.
In fact, it has quite a lot in common with Apache Karaf, which on a quick
inspection, looks like a good deployment alternative considering what we
already have.
(Being able to use a stable, community-driven alternative seems more
appealing than having to maintain our own framework).
However, before starting to migrate our applications I would like to ask a
few general questions about the framework.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
(1) From what I understand, "features" are the main deployment unit for
installing multi-bundle applications onto the Karaf runtime.
Although it appears to be a highly flexible format, it introduces a
level of indirection with the descriptor only containing references to the
actual deployment artifacts.
Do you have any plans of introducing other deployment formats, for
instance a more "direct" format that contains the actual artifacts to be
deployed?
(I am thinking of something along the lines of the PAR format in the
spring dm server.)
For instance, in our home-grown server we have a zip deployer that
expects a zip file containing the application bundles to be deployed.
(2) How extensible is the deployment architecture of Karaf?
Does it allow custom deployers to be hooked in to support other
deployment formats?
Would it be a complex task to introduce additional deployers?
(3) Are there any plans on providing some sort of in-container testing
framework (or maybe one already exists)?
I'm imagining some kind of simple testing infrastructure, such as an
(abstract?) base TestCase class that launches a bare-bones Karaf runtime
with the possibility for concrete TestCases to add
features/bundles/configurations? I believe that such an integration test
framework could be really useful.
(4) What is the preferred way of writing and launching applications for the
Karaf platform?
(I see that the user's guide contains a placeholder chapter for this
type of information but I was hoping that someone could give a brief
summary!)
(5) Are there any plans around Karaf development tools, such as Eclipse
plug-ins similar to those of spring dm server, that would allow a Karaf
server runtime to be defined and workspace bundles to be hot deployed?
Okay, that's all for now.
best regards, Peter
