Monday, April 23, 2018

ECF Photon adds Gogo Commands

A third major enhancement for ECF's implementation of OSGi Remote Services is the addition of Apache Gogo console commands for examining the existing state of remote services, and the ability to export a service and import an endpoint from the OSGi console.

See this wiki page describing the new commands and their usage.


Thursday, April 19, 2018

ECF Photon supports Bndtools

A second major enhancement for ECF Photon is adding support for using Bndtools to develop and test OSGi Remote Services.   Bndtools is increasingly popular for developing OSGi-based applications and frameworks, and we've added support for Bndtools Workspace, Project, and Run Descriptor templates for developing and testing remote services.

Initial documentation is available at Bndtools Support for Remote Services Development.

Note that these templates and the RSA impl may change slightly before ECF Photon, and new/additional templates will be added to (e.g.) support other distribution and discovery providers.


Monday, April 16, 2018

ECF Photon supports OSGI R7

ECF Photon has several major enhancements.   I'll blog about these enhancements individually over the coming weeks, starting with

Support for OSGI R7 Remote Services

In the R7 final draft specification (chapter 100) detail was added about the use of Remote Service Intents.   RS Intents describe a distribution provider's abstract capabilities.    By way of example, several new standard intents have been defined, including osgi.basic and osgi.async.   

The osgi.basic intent requires that a distribution provider support a remote service-specific timeout, as well as serialization of remote service arguments and return values include DTOs (Data Type Objects), java primitives, maps, collections, lists, OSGI Version, etc.   

The osgi.async intent requires that remote service method signatures using CompletableFuture, Future, and OSGI's Promise be supported directly by the distribution provider.   This allows non-blocking asynchronous remote services to be easily declared in the service interface, and implemented by the distribution provider.  Here is an example remote service declaration that demonstrates how the osgi.async intent can be used.   In a forthcoming tutorial, I'll show how such a small service can be easily defined, implemented, and remoted using ECF Remote Services.

ECF's remote services impl has multiple distribution providers, and open APIs for creating custom or extension providers.   Most of the existing ECF distribution providers already available have been updated to implement the R7-standardized intents.   Others will be updated prior to and after Photon release.