Karaf 4.0 is about to be released !
Almost 3 years since I haven't blogged, so I'm using the fact that the Karaf 4.0 release in under vote to start again. Karaf 4.0 brings a lot of new features, but one of the most important one is the new features service. It is originally a port of the Fuse/Fabric agent resolver to Karaf 4, but has since been extended a lot (and has actually been integrated back into Fuse 6.2). This new features services is used to install well known features, but even if it reuses the same features xml definition, it's not limited to those anymore and works in a very different way. The main difference is that the original features service (in Karaf 2.x and 3.x) is quite blind when it comes to installing features. When a user asks for a feature installation, the process was quite simplistic: the service mainly goes through the list of bundles listed in the feature and install them. The introduction of the resolver flag brought some intelligence to the process, as the old and deprec