After Eclipse Milo™ 0.1.0 was released a few days back and is available on Maven Central since this week it was time to update my OPC UA component for Apache Camel to use the release version of Milo:

To be honest, I had my troubles in the past with the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF), not that it is a bad framework, but whatever I started it was complicated and never really worked for me. This story is different!

The upcoming version 2.1.0 of Eclipse Kura™ will feature an enhanced version of the Apache Camel™ integration which was introduced in Kura 2.0.0. There are various new ways on how to run Camel routes, configured either by XML routes or using the Java DSL. Apache Camel can act as a Kura application but, new in this release, there is also a way to simply configure Camel as a “cloud service”. In past releases of Kura, applications could only push data to one cloud target. The new 2.1.0 release will add the functionality of adding multiple cloud targets and one of those targets can be Apache Camel router instances.

Sometimes the simple things may be the most valuable. Testing with Eclipse Kura™ on a Raspberry Pi (or any other Eclipse Kura device) may be a bit tricky. Of course can use the Eclipse UI in combination with mToolkit. But if you want to edit, compile, deploy from a local desktop machine, to a Kura device, then you either need to click through the Web UI for uploading your application. But for this to work you also need to assembly a DP (distribution package).

But what if you could simply drop an OSGi bundle into a directory and let it get picked up by Kura automatically. Thanks to Apache File Install, there already is such a solution. File Install scans a folder and loads every OSGi bundle located in this folder. If a bundle is started and it gets overwritten in the file system, then File Install will reload and restart the bundle.

It took quite a while and triggered a bunch of pull request upstream, but finally I do have Eclipse Kura™ running with Apache Karaf™.

Now of course I immediately got the question: Why is that good? After all the recent setup still uses Equinox underneath in Karaf. Now what? … isn’t Equinox and Karaf something different? Read on …