OSGI Intro

On Tuesday, I attended the OSGI: Let’s Get Started session with Simon Maple and Zoë Slattery, courtesy of SkillsMatter and LJC. I figured it’s time to figure out what I am supposed to be doing with it. :)

For the last release I enabled OSGI headers for jslint4java. I was hoping that this session would show me how I fared in that.

First, what is OSGI? At the most basic, it’s a way of providing some order and structure to the traditional Java classpath. OSGI achieves this by using bundles.

A bundle is a regular jar file, but with additional metadata in META-INF/MANIFEST.MF. Details like the name, version and dependencies. The dependencies are interesting. A bundle can depend directly on other bundles, but that’s discouraged. A better approach is to specify that you depend on java packages. That way you don’t have to tie yourself to a particular provider of a package.

When OSGI loads in a bundle, it gives each bundle a unique ClassLoader. This means that:

• You can have multiple versions of bundles loaded simultaneously. You don’t have to force everything to the same version.

• Each bundle can only see classes that have been explicitly exported by its dependencies, not the whole transitive closure. This is very good for keeping your code clean.

  This also leads to a pattern I’ve seen before in the maven world: separate artifacts for APIs vs implementation. Pulling out interfaces is generally a good idea. But by putting them in a separate OSGI bundle, you enforce that your implementation can remain invisible. Even the “hello OSGI world” demo was shown this way.

On top of this metadata, OSGI provides a runtime for loading and unloading bundles. The runtime also supports the concept of services, where you can ask the runtime for various services. This looks cool, but the dynamicity of it can be hard to deal with—that service you got from the runtime can disappear at any point. There was a demo of something called blueprint, which aims to help, but it looked almost exactly like “more Spring XML” to me. If I was doing this, I’d look at peaberry instead.

How do you go about getting started with OSGI? Well, you could manage the bundle metadata yourself, but it’s much easier to use a tool to do it for you. One such tool was demo’d: bnd. The maven-bundle-plugin that I used for jslint4java builds on bnd.

If you need a runtime for your app, there are two in common use: Equinox and Felix. Equinox is the runtime used by Eclipse.

For followup detail, they recommended checking out anything by Neil Bartlett. It’s a shame he couldn’t make it.

Overall I was pretty impressed. It made me realise that I got the basics right, and I know where I need to go when I need more. Thanks, guys!

Having written all this, I’ve just realised the the wikipedia page on OSGI demonstrates nearly all of it, and with examples.