Apache Karaf: Year one in review.

On June 16th, 2010 Apache Karaf became a top level project at the Apache Software Foundation. During it’s first year the Apache Karaf team has enjoyed the process of creating a new Apache community, welcoming new contributors, producing many releases, accepting it’s first sub project, and planning for a bright future.

As it’s first birthday approaches we, the Karaf team, would like to look back at the year that was, and thank all of our users and contributors for making Apache Karaf’s inaugural year so exciting. For those interested in reading more about Karaf’s past, please see the article "A brief history of Apache Karaf".

Before we start our review of Apache Karaf’s first year, I’ve asked Guillaume Nodet (project founder) to share a few thoughts on were the project has been:

"Karaf is one year old as a top level project but the original code is more than 3 years old and I've spent a big chunk of that time working on Karaf's code base. The project is really great, but what I'm the most proud of is certainly having helped creating such an amazing and thriving community as this is definitely one of the best I've worked with.   

Happy birthday Karaf !"

Year in review:

There are so many highlights over the last twelve months to talk about, new features, improvements, releases, new contributors & users, projects selecting Karaf as their platform to build upon - the list goes on and on. To start the review I'd like to look at some of the raw statistics surrounding Karaf.

Karaf by the numbers:

Over the last year Apache Karaf has seen a steady increase in interest from its user base and the development community at large. In fact, the average monthly download volume has increased 10 fold from 500 to 5000 kits/month during this time. These numbers of course are collected from our nine releases!

source: Nexus Central Statistics, reproduced here with permission of Karaf PMC.

Breaking down the volume of Apache Karaf downloads by release version we observe that Karaf 2.0.0, 2.1.0, 2.1.3, and 2.2.0 have garnered interest from a large portion of our user base. We also can also see that our minor or “patch” releases have a steady following.

source: Nexus Central Statistics, reproduced here with permission of Karaf PMC.

Release Version	Total Downloads	Percent of Total Downloads	Issues Resolved
2.0.0	7219	29%	39
2.1.0	5072	20%	71
2.1.1	266	1.5%	16
2.1.2	584	2%	9
2.1.3	3007	12%	24
2.1.4	526	2%	14
2.1.5	58	0.5%	10
2.2.0	7358	30%	177
2.2.1	608	2%	82

When reviewing these numbers please bare in mind that higher version numbers have been available for a shorter period of time.

Welcoming new Contributors, Committers, and PMC!

The raw data surrounding Apache Karaf downloads doesn’t tell the whole story of the project. The real numbers we’re happy to boast about is all of the new members of our community. Our new users and contributors have been and continues to be one of the most dynamic and growing aspects of Karaf. Starting with a group of ten initial committers we now have just about doubled our team - no small feat for a new project. We’re always looking for more contributors though, so please visit our JIRA, read our email lists, and say ‘hi’ on irc.

Karaf’s first subproject “Apache Karaf Cellar”!

In the spring of 2011 Apache Karaf accepted its first externally donated sub-project. Apache Karaf Cellar provides Karaf with a clustering engine powered by Hazelcast. The developer behind this sub-project, Ioannis Canellos, along with the community have been steadily helping to integrate the technology deeper into Karaf, while extending its features.

A word from Jean-Baptiste:

As Apache Karaf’s first year as a top level project comes to an end I asked Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Karaf PMC, to share his thoughts on where the project will be heading in year two and beyond.

"Karaf is a highly strategic project in the OSGi eco-system. We built it as container/kernel, and Karaf aims to be the foundation of a lot of other projects, with different business requirements and implementations. The Karaf team works on major enhancements and new features to provide an enterprise OSGi application server. Karaf will become the premium container to all applications and projects that want to enter in the OSGi world with a ready to use environment. But more than a technical project, Karaf is an amazing community. The team is very eclectic: we discuss and share a lot to create a very active and interesting community. I'm very proud to be part of Karaf. I would like to address a huge thanks to Guillaume, Karaf founder and first PMC chair: he made an awesome work. I have a deep respect for this guy. 

Long life to Karaf and happy birthday !!"

The road ahead:

Now that we're entering our second year there are many new goals that we want to achieve. First and foremost will be our up coming 3.0.0 release, and our many planned patch releases for our currently supported branches. We hope to expand our community, and extend a warm welcome to everyone interested in contributing to Karaf's future success. So as we celebrate our achievements to date, please stay tuned for there is more to come :)