Thanks for the quick reply Guillaume! Regarding (1) I noticed that that kind of functionality is being planned in the Apache Aries incubator project. More specifically, it states that: "...the Aries project will develop a model for assembling an application/subsystem into a deployable unit, consisting of multiple bundles, as an archive which may include metadata that describes the version and external location of the application's constituent bundles or which may contain the bundles directly." Any idea of what the status is on that front?
Regarding (2): it sounds good with an extensible deployer architecture. However, I guess care needs to be taken to prevent deployers from stepping on each others toes. For instance, ensuring that a deployer does not uninstall artifacts owned/referenced by other deployers. I guess I would need to look a bit closer on the design before attempting a custom deployer. Regarding (4) and (5): would you recommend combining those approaches or is it an "either or" decision what approach to use? In any case, I sure will take a closer look at Karaf. Once again, thanks for your prompt reply! best regards, Peter Guillaume Nodet Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:15:45 -0700 2009/10/18 Peter Gardfjäll <[email protected]>: > 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. Yeah, that would make sense. We haven't discussed that yet, but maybe a zip file containing the feature descriptor in some META-INF or OSGI-INF folder along with an inlined repository (maybe using the maven layout) sounds like a good idea to distribute a stand alone application. > (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? We already have custom deployers. This has not been really documented yet, but we use those for deploying blueprint applications, spring applications and features. We plan on adding WAR deployment support (currently provided by ServiceMix along with a JBI deployer). You'll see a custom deployer at the following location: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/felix/trunk/karaf/deployer/blueprint/ You basically need to register a service in the OSGi registry such as the following one: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/felix/trunk/karaf/deployer/blueprint/src/main/java/org/apache/felix/karaf/deployer/blueprint/BlueprintDeploymentListener.java > (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. We currently use pax-exam and we may want to provide a bit more around that. > (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!) The concept of features would be the best we have for that I think. IIRC, the user's guide page you're referring to was supposed to explain how to create a custom feature descriptor and use it to deploy an application. > (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? There's one Eclipse plugin you may want to try: http://fusesource.com/forge/projects/EIK > Okay, that's all for now. > > best regards, Peter > -- Cheers, Guillaume Nodet ------------------------ Blog: http://gnodet.blogspot.com/ ------------------------ Open Source SOA http://fusesource.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
