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…
