Feature Management

Provisioning software is considered as the act of placing an individual software application or complete software stack onto a target system. That means installing/updating/uninstalling features to/from Carbon. The manual way of provisioning Carbon is dropping bundles and configuration files belongs to a 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 depends on specific versions of other components. In order to overcome these issues, Equinox P2 was integrated with Carbon.

Equinox P2 is known as a framework for provisioning Eclipse-based applications. But this definition is getting blurred now. Basically P2 can be used as a provisioning platform for any OSGi based application. P2 has been integrated with WSO2 Carbon platform to enable provisioning capabilities. With the previous release of WSO2 Carbon (version 2.0.0), it has this P2 based provisioning support. P2 integration takes WSO2 Carbon to an another level in terms of user friendliness in building customized SOA products. This enables users to download WSO2 Carbon framework or any other SOA products and extend them by installing various features.

Feature Manager provides a convenient user interface to perform provisioning operations such as installing, uninstalling, updating features.