Hello William, I really appreciate your concerns and your questions. I hope I can answer most of them here.
The
Why?• It's because of Liferay's thousands of features were very hard to evolve individually not only from the features themselves, but from our growing team's perspective of ownership, independence, etc.
• It's because we want future versions of Liferay to evolve organically instead of landing on your lap like some kind of volcanic eruption (and I say this lovingly). i.e. we'd love to evolve a continuous release type of behaviour.
• It's because when a thing needs to be severely fixed, it's almost always better to just throw it away and write a better thing to replace it. But you can't just rewrite a portal just because a small thing needs to be re-designed.
• It's to give you the possibility to say "I like this thing and want to use it, but I don't want that other thing over there!"
About OSGi being dead!• Any such arguments are really just FUD and I encourage you not to take other people's word for it, including my own, but really take a look at how modern OSGi is done for yourself and the problems it solves and don't discount it before doing that.
About JBoss and OSGi!• Respectfully, the last time I looked JBoss wasn't the center of the universe and pretty much all the other app servers have OSGi cores not to mention tons of other products ranging from enterprise to embedded.
About deploying on Tomcat!• What issue are you having? Aren't we still releasing bundles with tomcat? I'm pretty certain the last time I checked I was running Liferay on tomcat. In fact we're running on all our supported app servers, which granted we're still resolving some issues prior to release, but they are not deal breakers for those app servers. So expect Liferay with it's OSGi stuff to run on them.
About the SDK and deploying WABs (it's an OSGi spec for Webapps) and whether it's supported where Liferay is supported!• I think that's what we've done, yes!
About spending time using OSGi to use Liferay!• I think you will be pleasantly surprised so don't make any judgments until you've evaluated it for yourself. As of the recent area of OSGi its development is really quite brilliant. I really encourage you to take a look at budding projects like
OSGi enRoute, the long standing flagship of OSGi development
BND/Tools, and Liferay's very own upcoming BLADE Tools (coming soon). One of the goals is to try as much as possible to keep you well within your own comfort zone and have the minimal proprietary development paradigms as we can stand.
Sincerely,
- Ray
