InfoQ Homepage Presentations OSGi – The Missing Piece Of The Jigsaw
OSGi – The Missing Piece Of The Jigsaw
50:02
Summary
Ian Robinson explains where OSGi fits into the Java ecosystem, presenting the needs met by OSGi, the framework’s current status and a peek of future developments.
Bio
Ian Robinson is an IBM Distinguished Engineer in IBM's WebSphere development organization, based at the IBM Hursley Software Lab in the UK. He is an active member of the OSGi Alliance, he helped initiate the open source Apache Aries project to implement enterprise OSGi componentry, and leads the integration of these technologies with IBM's WebSphere platform.
About the conference
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Jun 28, 2011
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Community comments
OSGi for web application
by Daniel Joseph,
Re: OSGi for web application
by Richard Vowles,
Re: OSGi for web application
by Han Meng,
Re: OSGi for web application
by Marc Sch,
OSGi for web application
by Daniel Joseph,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
I understand the role OSGi plays in fixing the classpath mess. But I do not understand the need for OSGi’s dynamic service capability for web applications especially when almost all the web applications are shut down to update any small piece of code. If we are shutting down applications for update, what do we gain from OSGi (and its new programming model) other than the fix for classpath? Could someone enlighten me please?
Re: OSGi for web application
by Richard Vowles,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
Er, apart from not having to shut down the web application?
Re: OSGi for web application
by Han Meng,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
I think the benefits includes,
1. Modular
2. Dynamic, for this, it includes several meanings, pluggable service, replace and update service without stopping whole application.
3. Extensible
Re: OSGi for web application
by Marc Sch,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
In some cases it might be relevant not having to shut down the whole system (especially for smaller system which might just run on one node rather than a cluster).
I am imagining a osgi-web-application which has a special bundle that is stopped by default. Once it gets started it will display a message on each page to the user, letting him know that an update of the system will occur soon and that some services might not be available for a short while (updating in OSGi is quick).
When the update occurs the relevant services will be shut down and the consuming bundle has to deal with that, meaning that the user will be presented a message that the service he is trying to acces is curerntly not available. When the service is back everything continues as usual and the update-notifier-bundle can be stopped (until the next release).
This is just a quick idea without putting much time into the details ;)
As Ian states out, having the application handle services going away is cumbersome, and it will be interesting to see how these blueprint-containers will help at this point.
I personally cant wait to try out these WTP plugins...but I should get some rest first :-D
Btw: for me, this is one of the best summaries on OSGi-technology I've found until now. Hope to hear/see more from Ian