Sometimes the simple things may be the most valuable. Testing with Eclipse Kura™ on a Raspberry Pi (or any other Eclipse Kura device) may be a bit tricky. Of course can use the Eclipse UI in combination with mToolkit. But if you want to edit, compile, deploy from a local desktop machine, to a Kura device, then you either need to click through the Web UI for uploading your application. But for this to work you also need to assembly a DP (distribution package).

But what if you could simply drop an OSGi bundle into a directory and let it get picked up by Kura automatically. Thanks to Apache File Install, there already is such a solution. File Install scans a folder and loads every OSGi bundle located in this folder. If a bundle is started and it gets overwritten in the file system, then File Install will reload and restart the bundle.

It took quite a while and triggered a bunch of pull request upstream, but finally I do have Eclipse Kura™ running with Apache Karaf™.

Now of course I immediately got the question: Why is that good? After all the recent setup still uses Equinox underneath in Karaf. Now what? … isn’t Equinox and Karaf something different? Read on …

OpenTSDB is an open source, scalable, <buzzword>big data</buzzword> solution for storing time series data. Well, that what the name of the project actually says ;-) In combination with Grafana you can pretty easy build a few nice dashboards for visualizing that data. The only question is of course, how do you get your data into that system.

So here comes a puzzle for you … You do have Apache Camel (2.17), which internally uses com.googlecode.concurrentlinkedhashmap, which uses sun.misc.Unsafe. Now you can argue a lot about this is necessary or not. I just is that way. So starting up Apache Camel in an OSGi container which does strict processing of classes, using Apache Camel will run into a “java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError” issue due to “sun/misc/Unsafe”.

My first two weeks at Red Hat have been quite awesome! There is a lot to learn and one the first things I checked out was Apache Camel and Eclipse Milo. While Camel is more known open source project, Eclipse Milo is a newcomer project at the Eclipse Foundation. And while it is officially still in the Incubation Phase, it is a tool you can really work with! Eclipse Milo is an OPC UA client and server implementation.