A bit of history

Hawtio started as the Fuse Console project to provide an UI for Fuse (then moved to JBoss and Red Hat).

Quickly, it was rebranded as Hawtio and development continued with the same principles.

The fundamental technologies and concepts used were:

  • Single Page Application (SPA) model, where all routing happened on the client (browser) side

  • Jolokia as the JMX Protocol Adaptor to expose an MBean view of the running Java/JVM application through web-friendly REST endpoints

  • TypeScript as the implementation language adding type safety to JavaScript

  • Angular.JS as the implementation library/framework, based on data binding

  • Bootstrap as the CSS framework

Initially, all the development was performed in a single Hawtio Github repository and a large part of the codebase was implemented in Java for the backend services. TypeScript code resided in a single module and ultimately was packaged as a Java Web Archive (WAR).

Hawtio was consumed as Java Web Application by JBoss Fuse server (based on Karaf/OSGi) and deployment modularity was not a big concern.

In order to visualize more and more features from JBoss Fuse (Fabric8, Camel, ActiveMQ, Zookeeper, Git, Maven, remote containers), more and more Hawtio plugins were created, but these plugins, implemented with TypeScript and Angular.JS were part of what now we call a monorepo.

This was all Hawtio 1.x based on Angular.JS 1.x…​

Hawtio 2

Hawtio 2 was an attempt to change the structure of the project without changing the technologies being used. The main reason was that more and more client/browser-side JavaScript applications were switching to NPM.

While even Hawtio 1.x included package.json, it was never intended to be actually published to and consumed from the NPM registry.

We have published several modules/packages to NPM under the @hawtio organization. These include:

Hawtio 3

Hawtio 3 did the opposite of Hawtio 2, relying heavily on packages consumed from NPM as Hawtio 2, but this time it dropped Angular.JS in favor of React.

Without going into details about the exact reasons, Hawtio never really succeeded at switching from Angular.JS to new Angular.IO.

React felt more lightweight than Angular.IO and the impression remains.

Hawtio 4

The only difference between Hawtio 3 and Hawtio 4 is related to the server side. In that the entire backend had to move from JavaEE to JakartaEE. This required the refactoring from a dependence on Camel 2 to Camel 3.

Spring Boot 3 took the radical approach of moving directly to JDK 17 as the baseline and JakartaEE 9 APIs. The supporting of both javax. and jakarta. namespaces would have proven too constly in the long term and would not force users to switch at all…​

So the development continues…​