Feature Management
- Former user (Deleted)
Each WSO2 product is a collection of reusable software units called features, where a single feature is a list of components and/or other feature. A component in WSO2 products is a single or a collection of OSGi bundles. Similar to a standard JAR file in Java, a bundle is the modularization unit in OSGi.
Components add functionality. For example, the statistics component enables users to monitor system and service-level statistics. This component contains two bundles. One is the back-end bundle that collects, summarizes and stores statistics. The other is the front-end bundle that presents data to the user through a user-friendly interface. The component-based architecture of WSO2 products allows developers to build their own products, simply by adding and removing components.
What is software provisioning
Provisioning software is the act of placing an individual software application or a complete software stack onto a target system. What we mean by provisioning WSO2 products is installing/updating/uninstalling features to/from WSO2 Carbon - the base platform on top of which all WSO2 products are developed. It is also possible to revert to a previous feature configuration using provisioning support.
You can easily install features to any WSO2 product using the WSO2 Component Manager, which comes with the products. Component manager is powered by Equinox P2 and allows you to connect to a remote or local P2 repository and get any feature installed into the product's runtime. P2 is used as a provisioning platform for any OSGi-based application. It enables easy provisioning capabilities and increases the user-friendliness in building customized SOA products using the Carbon platform. WSO2 Feature Manager provides a convenient user interface to perform common provisioning operations and related repository management functions.
You can also manually provision Carbon by dropping bundles and configuration files that belong to a feature. This method is generally not recommended because it can lead to issues if you do not manually find all dependencies and install them. Features/components can have many dependencies with other features/components and some even depend on specific versions of other components. Therefore, we recommend you to use the component manager as explained in the next section.
This section contains the following information: