Apache Karaf

ApacheCon was really interesting this year! Recently, a lot of people have expressed a real interest in ServiceMix Kernel, our generic OSGi distribution for server side applications. We've been discussing moving this subproject into Apache Felix for several reasons:

• raise the visibility and awareness on ServiceMix Kernel
• attract a broader community

Several Apache projects are planning to use ServiceMix Kernel as their container: this includes Apache James, Apache Directory and Apache ActiveMQ. The Apache Sling community is also willing to contribute to this effort along with some other groups like the OPS4J project.

During this discussion, a name as been proposed by Jamie Goodyear: Apache Karaf.

A carafe is a small container used for serving wine and other drinks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carafe). In similarity to the name the Kernel allows applications to be more easily handled, and improves their characteristics (much like a bottle of wine left to breath in a decanter) :)

I have to thanks Jamie for this name, I really like it. Plus the K might eventually fill a hole in the list of Apache projects and also reminds the Kernel.

Moving into Felix does not mean that Karaf will be tied to the Felix OSGi runtime. We haven't really worked on that yet, but the goal is to be able to use either Felix or Equinox runtimes inside Karaf. Maybe we'll provide two different distributions in the future...

Today, both ServiceMix and Felix community have voted and accepted this move. I think this is a great news for ServiceMix Kernel users, for the Apache communities and for all OSGi users and I'm really excited about that...

New clustering engine in ServiceMix 4

I have expressed several times on the mailing list that the JMS flow included in ServiceMix 3 has some deficiencies. Learning from that, ServiceMix 4 has a brand new clustering engine that Adrian and I have discussed a bit at ApacheCon. He blogged about that recently, so have a look at his blog post.

Apache ServiceMix 4.0.0 and Apache ServiceMix NMR 1.0.0

During ApacheCon last week, we're released Apache ServiceMix 4.0.0, the first release of our OSGi-based integration platform.
We've also released Apache ServiceMix NMR 1.0.0 which contains the NMR layer, the JBI layer. The main distribution is a minimal JBI container with no components.
Have a look at those, we welcome your feedback!

Whitepaper: Large scale deployments with ServiceMix 4

At ApacheCon Europe last week, Andreas Gies, a coworker, has given a nice presentation about large scale deployments with ServiceMix 4. It has been now published as a whitepaper and is available on the FUSE site.