Software provisioning is considered to be the act of placing an individual software application or a complete software stack onto a target system. In our case, it entails installing/updating/uninstalling features to/from Carbon. The manual method of provisioning Carbon involves dropping bundles and configuration files belonging to a particular feature. This method is not recommended since it can cause errors: finding the exact set of components and configuration files is a difficult task. Components have inter-dependencies with other components; some components depend on specific versions of other components. In order to overcome these issues, Equinox P2 was integrated with Carbon.
Equinox P2 is best known as a framework for provisioning Eclipse-based applications. However, this definition does not fully reflect the capabilities of P2. In addition to Eclipse-based applications, P2 can also be used as a provisioning platform for any OSGi based application. P2 has been integrated with the WSO2 Carbon platform to enable provisioning capabilities as of the previous release of WSO2 Carbon (version 2.0.0). P2 integration takes WSO2 Carbon to a new level in terms of user-friendliness for building customized SOA products. It enables users to download the WSO2 Carbon framework, or any other SOA product, and extend it by installing various features.
Feature Manager provides a convenient user interface for performing provisioning operations such as installing, uninstalling, and updating features.