We recently talked about using Declarative Services for creating a
smaller karaf distro.
I think we could even go farther than that. I think the core of karaf is
the karaf features and pax url. So how about just starting these in the
startup features.
Everything else could be loaded as a feature and so might be optional.
So basically it would mainly be features core, pax url, pax logging +
their dependencies. As blueprint would be overkill for this scenario we
would have to make the features core only use plain OSGi APIs but that
should be doable. Of course such a runtime would have no shell so we
would need to add some way to stop karaf but that should also be doable.
So what would a user get with this compared to plain OSGi? Basically he
would be able to install all the nice existing features for cxf, camel,
.. and also of course his own application, all from a maven repo.
We might also consider the shell to be a core of karaf but I am not sure
it is absolutely necessary.
If you think this is worth pursuing I could make the features core
independent of blueprint and create a proof of concept distro like
described.
What do you think?
Christian
--
Christian Schneider
http://www.liquid-reality.de
Open Source Architect
http://www.talend.com
