A word about the usage survey

[Thomas Calmant]

Hi,

It's been a while since the last answer on the iPOPO usage survey, so here comes, as promised, a small review of the answers:

There have been a dozen answers, the majority of them coming from the US, then comes Europe and Eastern Asia.

The main users are industrials (R&D and production) then research.

iPOPO is mostly used in long-lived and dynamic applications, in IoT (both gateways and devices) and to monitor softwares.

Most features are considered useful, especially the Console and Remote Shell, the HTTP Service and Remote Services.

Apparently, I should add more documentation about the iPOPO waiting list as many people replied "I don't know about it".

The requested improvements are mainly about API Signatures and Semantics, feel free to send feedback to this mailing list.

It has also been requested to enhance security on bundle installation, the bundle activators and services lookup.

This could be done by adding the concept of roles and checking bundle signatures, but this will require some brainstorming before initiating any development.

The most wanted features in iPOPO are:

- OSGI's ServiceFactory (high priority): they'll be added in the next release (0.6.5)

- Web Console (high priority): I'll restart the "Pelix Webconsole" project from scratch this summer.

- Optional/Hot-Plugged iPOPO handlers (high priority): this could be done from 0.6.6, but choices will have to be made about error handling

- Roles in shell sessions (low priority): this could be the starting point of the security enhancement required above.

Finally, most of the "free text" answers were about enhancing the documentation and describing precisely the differences between Pelix/iPOPO and and Java implementations of OSGi (Felix, Karaf, Knopflerfish, ...)

Also, every answer ended with a kind word about the project: thank you all :)

A word about the release of iPOPO 0.6.5: I'll try to finish the ZooKeeper remote service discovery ASAP, before the release.

The Service Factory feature will stay as is (unless bugs are reported): the Prototype Service Factory will be implemented in a future version.

As always, don't hesitate to ask questions and give feedback on the mailing lists!

And if you want to share your use of iPOPO, just ask to be added on the "Who uses iPOPO ?" page, either on the mailing list or using a pull request.

Thank you all for your answers.

Best regards,

Thomas