At Sunshower.io, we write software for people who write software. We’re pleased to announce something new to help folks scale their software: Zephyr, a next-generation plugin framework written in Java. Zephyr is an OSGi alternative — inspired by the best parts of it while dramatically reducing complexity and improving interoperability with existing frameworks and ecosystems.

Zephyr was born from our frustration with existing module systems. We started off using Wildfly and embedding OSGi, but this proved inadequate for the complex dependency graphs we encountered while developing the Sunshower platform. In particular, continually copy/pasting around manifests to import the dozens of packages from various frameworks was tedious and error-prone (and auto-generating them wasn’t much better, in fact). It greatly increased the complexity of our builds and deployments as we’d continually need to rev released versions of modules. This is to say nothing of the complexities of testing module interactions, or the joys of a ClassNotFoundException appearing suddenly after weeks of smooth operation caused by a forgotten Package-Imports declaration.

After over 18 months of working around framework limitations, we looked at the “Kernel” that arose from coping with these problems and decided “Hey, this is pretty useful. Let’s get rid of underlying systems and just use that.” And now we’re open-sourcing it.

Small but mighty, Zephyr aggressively and automatically parallelizes management operations while running in less than 512KB of memory. It intelligently manages all aspects of plugin lifecycle, including dependency resolution. Deploying new plugins is quick and painless. And, of course, setting up plugin dependencies for tests is, well, a breeze.

While we wrote it in Java, Zephyr works with whatever languages you normally use by installing language runtimes as plugins. You can have multiple frameworks running side by side, eliminating a lot of overhead associated with rewrites, scaling and transitioning architectures.

Zephyr is available on Github under an MIT license. Enterprise support contracts are available. Go check out the website, the docs or the repository. We’d love to have you involved!

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