Hello All, First let me say that I'm very impressed with the Ace project and it's goals. I've been following it for a year or two now. I've unfortunately not been able to use it in production yet as I've been waiting for it to evolve a little more in certain aspects. The comments about the project being in relatively in maintenance mode has sparked me to send a note that I've been meaning to send for a while.
I think what would help take this project to the next level would be a little more focus on the user experience of packaging, deploying and managing an OSGi system, and potentially delegating some of the heavy lifting around deployment scheduling to other complementary systems. For example, if the user interface was a little more task oriented and maybe a few key use cases could be targeted and optimized. Possibly the "distribution building" task. I feel like bundles and features are more of a developer responsibility, but creating a distribution and assigning it to a target is more of a deployer task. Ace feels more like a platform to be used by a deployer role. Also, potentially more integrations with existing deployment infrastructure could be developed (i.e. use HashiCorp's Nomad for the target agent to schedule the actual deployment on the node, or build integration with openshift, kubernetes, docker, fabric8, etc). If existing platforms could be leveraged, you can reduce the need to recreate that wheel, and gain share in existing marketplaces. One of the great things about the osgi model, and particularly the requirements / capabilities model is being able to express these dependencies in the packaging. It seems they've been envisioned to encompass ideas such as operating system, memory, installed libraries and application server components, etc. but I have not seen a platform take advantage of this potential metadata (at least in the open source world). I hope to be able to contribute more than just words. I need to figure out whether or not I can sign a CLA. I have developed several applications using osgi, vaadin and bndtools in the last several years so I feel like I could help where needed. But in the meantime, I did want to share a few mock-ups I created back in 2015. I hope their relatively self-explanatory and maybe are inspirational. Thanks for everyone's hard work! attached: HomePage.png, PackagePage.png, TargetsPage.png - Zach Hodges
