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Backward Compatibility
2010-01-26
In our day to day work we often use the term backward compatible. We use this term as if it is a binary: something is backward compatible or it is not backward compatible. And yes, this is true if a client directly works with a provider. If the provider can work with clients that were compiled against a previous version then the provider can be said to be backward compatible with that previous version.
So is this always binary? Nope. The reason is the design by contract rule that we all follow, or should follow. In Java, we have this rule embodied in the interface, in C++ we used abstract classes. The primary advantage of design by contract is that now the client depends on the contract and the implementation depends on the contract but the client no longer depends on the implementation. Not only allows this model to have multiple implementations for the same contract, it also makes the dependencies smaller, more concise, and most important of all explicit. This model is depicted in the next figure.
Instead of having two parties, where the backward compatibility was binary, we now have three parties making the situation a tad more convoluted. The compatibility is now expressed against the contract package because client and implementer have no longer any dependency on each other. What kind of changes can we make that do not affect the client? Well, these are the same changes we could make to the implementer in the simple case. Adding members to classes and adding fields to interfaces is harmless for clients of these classes and interfaces, they never know the difference. Even semantic changes are ok as long as we specify the evolution rules in the new contract.
However, the situation is different for an implementer of a contract; an implementer is semantically much closer bound to the contract than the client. A client compiled against version 1 of the contract can be bound to a backward compatible implementer that is bound to version 2 of the contract. However, a client compiled against version 2 of a contract must never be bound to a version 1 implementation because such an implementer has no knowledge of the changes in the contract and can therefore not faithfully implement it.
Interestingly, some of these incompatibility semantics show up in the way Java works. Implementers usually implement a number of Java interfaces; not implementing all the methods in such an interface will throw a No Such Method Error when called, clearly a violation of the new contract. In this article I talk about implementing the contract, however. There are many OSGi specifications where the client is also required to implement interfaces for callbacks but they are still considered clients. For example, in the Event Admin specification the client must implement the Event Listener service. These interfaces are called client interfaces and any change in them is incompatible for a client.
Using the contract model, we must take this asymmetric situation between clients and implementers into account when discussing backward compatibility. Almost any change in the contract will require the implementer to be aware of this change. However, there are a few cases where you can change the contract without requiring the implementer's awareness. We had such an instance in the upcoming enterprise release. In the previous release, the Blueprint API had no generics, in this release the generic signatures are added. Generics are erased in runtime, therefore existing Blueprint implementations cannot detect the difference in API and there are no additional responsibilities. Such a change is backward compatible for implementers.
I hope it is clear that backward compatibility has 2 dimensions: clients and implementers. When we make a change to the contract we must ask ourselves if this change is compatible with clients and implementers. Theoretically there are four cases, however, in practice any client backward incompatible change is very likely to be implementation incompatible as well, so there are only three cases left. The remaining question is now how to handle these three cases in OSGi. Obviously, the version attribute is the most applicable place to start.
The only party that knows about the change is the person changing contract. This person must somehow must convey its backward compatibility rules to the client and to the implementer. Surprisingly (well not really), these three cases map very well to the three parts of the OSGi version scheme:
Using OSGi version ranges, implementers can import all versions where the major and minor part is fixed and ignore micro changes. For example, when the package that is compiled against has version 2.3.6, then the implementer should import [2.3,2.4). Clients can import all versions where the major part is fixed. For example: [2.3,3). I call this model of importing different ranges based on the version that is compiled against the version policy. There is an implementation policy and a client policy.
This model works very well but it has one huge disadvantage: it requires that exporters follow the OSGi version semantics and not just the syntax. Unfortunately, we punted on the semantics when we had to specify the version attribute. We did recommend a good strategy but we did not mandate it nor was it complete. In practice, this means that people are not carefully versioning their packages (if at all!). It is always tempting to put the specification version on the package because this makes it clear which version of the specification you're getting when you have to select a package. However, this is the so called marketing version. Netscape Navigator came out as version 4.0 because it had to compete with Internet Explorer 3.0, there never was a version 3.0. In OSGi, we are currently at release 4.2 but if you look at the framework package version you'll find we're at 1.5.1, telling you it had 5 client backward compatible changes and since then one implementation backward compatible change. In contrast Wireadmin is still at 1.0. There are valid reasons for marketing versions but they unfortunately do not encode the evolution path the package has taken. It means that clients and implementers can no longer use a version policy to specify their compatibility requirements and must treat the version as an opaque identifier. The dire consequence of this model is that you basically have to rebuild all dependencies for any tiny change because clients and implementers can no longer reason about backward compatibility.
One solution that I proposed many years ago is to export a package under multiple versions. The exporter knows much more about its compatibility with prior versions, being able to specify the compatibility saves the importer from having to make assumptions. However, exporting a package under multiple versions only supports 2 cases for backward compatibility. If it is listed, it is backward compatible, if not, it is not compatible. As I hope this blog has demonstrated, treating backward compatibility as black and white is not sufficient.
I therefore hope it is clear that the exporter must provide different bits of information for the implementers and the clients. This could be a new version like attribute or it could use something like exporting three independent numbers:
The author of the contract package would maintain these numbers and incrementing them when the corresponding compatibility broke. This model seems to combine the best of both worlds. It exposes the different compatibilities without any required knowledge on the importer's side. However, my personal position is that the current version policy works today if people are willing to follow the rules. Anything else will require spec changes. The OSGi has been accurately versioning their packages correctly since 1998. The thousand dollar question is, will others follow these semantics?
Peter Kriens
P.S. In the past year I've done some experimenting with automatically generating import ranges based on the exported version in bnd and an implementation and client version policy. You can read about these experiments here.
So is this always binary? Nope. The reason is the design by contract rule that we all follow, or should follow. In Java, we have this rule embodied in the interface, in C++ we used abstract classes. The primary advantage of design by contract is that now the client depends on the contract and the implementation depends on the contract but the client no longer depends on the implementation. Not only allows this model to have multiple implementations for the same contract, it also makes the dependencies smaller, more concise, and most important of all explicit. This model is depicted in the next figure.
Instead of having two parties, where the backward compatibility was binary, we now have three parties making the situation a tad more convoluted. The compatibility is now expressed against the contract package because client and implementer have no longer any dependency on each other. What kind of changes can we make that do not affect the client? Well, these are the same changes we could make to the implementer in the simple case. Adding members to classes and adding fields to interfaces is harmless for clients of these classes and interfaces, they never know the difference. Even semantic changes are ok as long as we specify the evolution rules in the new contract.
However, the situation is different for an implementer of a contract; an implementer is semantically much closer bound to the contract than the client. A client compiled against version 1 of the contract can be bound to a backward compatible implementer that is bound to version 2 of the contract. However, a client compiled against version 2 of a contract must never be bound to a version 1 implementation because such an implementer has no knowledge of the changes in the contract and can therefore not faithfully implement it.
Interestingly, some of these incompatibility semantics show up in the way Java works. Implementers usually implement a number of Java interfaces; not implementing all the methods in such an interface will throw a No Such Method Error when called, clearly a violation of the new contract. In this article I talk about implementing the contract, however. There are many OSGi specifications where the client is also required to implement interfaces for callbacks but they are still considered clients. For example, in the Event Admin specification the client must implement the Event Listener service. These interfaces are called client interfaces and any change in them is incompatible for a client.
Using the contract model, we must take this asymmetric situation between clients and implementers into account when discussing backward compatibility. Almost any change in the contract will require the implementer to be aware of this change. However, there are a few cases where you can change the contract without requiring the implementer's awareness. We had such an instance in the upcoming enterprise release. In the previous release, the Blueprint API had no generics, in this release the generic signatures are added. Generics are erased in runtime, therefore existing Blueprint implementations cannot detect the difference in API and there are no additional responsibilities. Such a change is backward compatible for implementers.
I hope it is clear that backward compatibility has 2 dimensions: clients and implementers. When we make a change to the contract we must ask ourselves if this change is compatible with clients and implementers. Theoretically there are four cases, however, in practice any client backward incompatible change is very likely to be implementation incompatible as well, so there are only three cases left. The remaining question is now how to handle these three cases in OSGi. Obviously, the version attribute is the most applicable place to start.
The only party that knows about the change is the person changing contract. This person must somehow must convey its backward compatibility rules to the client and to the implementer. Surprisingly (well not really), these three cases map very well to the three parts of the OSGi version scheme:
- major change - Incompatible for implementers and clients
- minor change - Incompatible for implementers, compatible for clients.
- micro change - Compatible for implementers and clients
Using OSGi version ranges, implementers can import all versions where the major and minor part is fixed and ignore micro changes. For example, when the package that is compiled against has version 2.3.6, then the implementer should import [2.3,2.4). Clients can import all versions where the major part is fixed. For example: [2.3,3). I call this model of importing different ranges based on the version that is compiled against the version policy. There is an implementation policy and a client policy.
This model works very well but it has one huge disadvantage: it requires that exporters follow the OSGi version semantics and not just the syntax. Unfortunately, we punted on the semantics when we had to specify the version attribute. We did recommend a good strategy but we did not mandate it nor was it complete. In practice, this means that people are not carefully versioning their packages (if at all!). It is always tempting to put the specification version on the package because this makes it clear which version of the specification you're getting when you have to select a package. However, this is the so called marketing version. Netscape Navigator came out as version 4.0 because it had to compete with Internet Explorer 3.0, there never was a version 3.0. In OSGi, we are currently at release 4.2 but if you look at the framework package version you'll find we're at 1.5.1, telling you it had 5 client backward compatible changes and since then one implementation backward compatible change. In contrast Wireadmin is still at 1.0. There are valid reasons for marketing versions but they unfortunately do not encode the evolution path the package has taken. It means that clients and implementers can no longer use a version policy to specify their compatibility requirements and must treat the version as an opaque identifier. The dire consequence of this model is that you basically have to rebuild all dependencies for any tiny change because clients and implementers can no longer reason about backward compatibility.
One solution that I proposed many years ago is to export a package under multiple versions. The exporter knows much more about its compatibility with prior versions, being able to specify the compatibility saves the importer from having to make assumptions. However, exporting a package under multiple versions only supports 2 cases for backward compatibility. If it is listed, it is backward compatible, if not, it is not compatible. As I hope this blog has demonstrated, treating backward compatibility as black and white is not sufficient.
I therefore hope it is clear that the exporter must provide different bits of information for the implementers and the clients. This could be a new version like attribute or it could use something like exporting three independent numbers:
- An implementation compatibility number
- A client compatibility number
- A revision number
The author of the contract package would maintain these numbers and incrementing them when the corresponding compatibility broke. This model seems to combine the best of both worlds. It exposes the different compatibilities without any required knowledge on the importer's side. However, my personal position is that the current version policy works today if people are willing to follow the rules. Anything else will require spec changes. The OSGi has been accurately versioning their packages correctly since 1998. The thousand dollar question is, will others follow these semantics?
Peter Kriens
P.S. In the past year I've done some experimenting with automatically generating import ranges based on the exported version in bnd and an implementation and client version policy. You can read about these experiments here.
Comments
OSGi on the Gateway
2010-01-20
This week I am in Berlin; not because of the Green Week (which seems to have gobbled up all hotel rooms) but for a meeting of experts from OSGi Alliance, HGI, Broadband Forum, and UPnP Forum that was organized by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories . Eleven years ago we optimistically started defining a service platform for the home and utterly failed when the Internet bubble imploded in 2001. However, it seems that the seeds we planted then were not destroyed in the long drought since 2001, there is a surprising amount of activity in this area.The reason for this Berlin meeting is that is a flurry of activity around the home gateway. The HGI is looking at adding an execution environment, the Broadband Forum is working on a management model for execution environments on gateways, and the UPnP Forum has been working on managing an execution environment through UPnP as well (UPnP DM). And OSGi, well, we've been doing things in this area since the last millennium.
It is really good to have these different groups around the table. It turns out our maturity is a huge advantage. Though all the planned execution environment plans on the table clearly do not restrict themselves to OSGi, OSGi is in all cases a primary candidate. This seems to work out very well for all parties. OSGi is quite mature and is based on a lot of real world experience. This is a good test case for the different models and it of course ensures that the intricacies on OSGi are well supported.
It is a good sign that these different organizations are collaborating this much, lots of energy in the room!
Peter Kriens
Nested Frameworks
2010-01-17
I do not think we had application servers in mind when we had our first OSGi discussions in 1998. On the contrary, the OSGi service platform was the application; the idea of running multiple applications inside the same OSGi Service Platform did not cross our minds. Would somebody have explained the concept at that time, it would probably have been considered an anathema to us. Bundles were not meant to be applications, they were meant to be the constituents; the application was what appeared when you ran different bundles together in a service platform.
History played an interesting trick with this model. The class loading model of OSGi was more or less an afterthought, necessary to support the service oriented programming model. This detail caught the eye of many developers struggling with the class loaders in Java. However, instead of seeing a collaborative programming model, most saw class loaders on steroids. With release 4 we provided the zenith of all class loaders: allowing multiple versions to reside in the same framework. This was by many seen as the grail that solved the pesky problem of using multiple libraries that had conflicting version requirements. Though OSGi indeed could solve this problem better than anyone else it is illustrative that multiple versions was completely unnecessary for the original OSGi service oriented programming model. Actually, Richard Hall and BJ Hargrave had to explain the paradoxically sounding idea of exporting implementation classes many times to me.
With release 4, OSGi became salon fähig for the Application Server space. JONAS was the first but over time BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, JBoss followed. Even SAP and Oracle promised to follow this lead. The advantages of OSGi on this level are crystal clear but having the OSGi framework so close to the applications creates the temptation to allow applications to also use OSGi. Many applications are bursting out of their WAR format seams. The modularization provided by OSGi seems very attractive to remove the duplication that is embedded in the WAR architecture. It was Spring Source that made this module first available for enterprise developers with their Spring Source server. This lead is now followed by Oracle, IBM, and JBoss in a diverse set of open source projects.
The first automobiles in 1889 looked very much like the technology they replaced: horse carts. Over time the unique capabilities and requirements of an internal combustion engine resulted in the designs we see today. Is there an analogy with Application Servers and OSGi? Is OSGi just like an Application Server's programming model or should it be treated differently?
Though the OSGi indeed has class loaders on steroids, these class loaders can only alleviate the dependency problems caused by today's application models. I do not believe that the Application Server model where a number of WAR files are running in the same VM should be followed by an OSGi model where these WAR files are running in an OSGi framework only sharing their dependencies. Though it is good to manage a dependency (as OSGi does), it is best to not have a dependency in the first place. It is good to handle multiple versions of the same library but the problems caused by multiple versions quickly cascades to umanageable proportions.
I therefore believe that the original model promoted by OSGi, where the application emerges from the installed bundles, is still by far the best model we have. In this model bundles adapt to each other and collaborate with each other through services; exporting implementation classes is an anathema in this model. Any services in the service registry are available to all bundles because the framework is the application.
This model raises the question how to handle multiple independent applications. Do they all require their own framework? The answer is an unequivocal yes! The cost of this model with the current OSGi frameworks could be quite high. Fortunately, the OSGi CPEG is currently working on nested frameworks. Nested frameworks allow the creation of a composite bundle. This is a bundle that acts as a wormhole to another framework. Nested frameworks will have low overhead and can easily share services and packages among each other.
Nested frameworks will likely appear in a future OSGi specification. It will definitely take time to work out all the special cases but it looks very promising so far. Thomas Watson from IBM has been experimenting and the latest versions of Equinox already provide some of the behavior in experimental form. For me, this is the most exciting RFC in progress. The nested model will enable an application programming model very close to the original OSGi service oriented programming model we envisioned a decade ago. However, with this simple recursive rule of nested frameworks we do not limit it to small embedded devices but enable the same model for (very) large enterprise applications running in large application servers as well.
Peter Kriens
History played an interesting trick with this model. The class loading model of OSGi was more or less an afterthought, necessary to support the service oriented programming model. This detail caught the eye of many developers struggling with the class loaders in Java. However, instead of seeing a collaborative programming model, most saw class loaders on steroids. With release 4 we provided the zenith of all class loaders: allowing multiple versions to reside in the same framework. This was by many seen as the grail that solved the pesky problem of using multiple libraries that had conflicting version requirements. Though OSGi indeed could solve this problem better than anyone else it is illustrative that multiple versions was completely unnecessary for the original OSGi service oriented programming model. Actually, Richard Hall and BJ Hargrave had to explain the paradoxically sounding idea of exporting implementation classes many times to me.
With release 4, OSGi became salon fähig for the Application Server space. JONAS was the first but over time BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, JBoss followed. Even SAP and Oracle promised to follow this lead. The advantages of OSGi on this level are crystal clear but having the OSGi framework so close to the applications creates the temptation to allow applications to also use OSGi. Many applications are bursting out of their WAR format seams. The modularization provided by OSGi seems very attractive to remove the duplication that is embedded in the WAR architecture. It was Spring Source that made this module first available for enterprise developers with their Spring Source server. This lead is now followed by Oracle, IBM, and JBoss in a diverse set of open source projects.
The first automobiles in 1889 looked very much like the technology they replaced: horse carts. Over time the unique capabilities and requirements of an internal combustion engine resulted in the designs we see today. Is there an analogy with Application Servers and OSGi? Is OSGi just like an Application Server's programming model or should it be treated differently?Though the OSGi indeed has class loaders on steroids, these class loaders can only alleviate the dependency problems caused by today's application models. I do not believe that the Application Server model where a number of WAR files are running in the same VM should be followed by an OSGi model where these WAR files are running in an OSGi framework only sharing their dependencies. Though it is good to manage a dependency (as OSGi does), it is best to not have a dependency in the first place. It is good to handle multiple versions of the same library but the problems caused by multiple versions quickly cascades to umanageable proportions.
I therefore believe that the original model promoted by OSGi, where the application emerges from the installed bundles, is still by far the best model we have. In this model bundles adapt to each other and collaborate with each other through services; exporting implementation classes is an anathema in this model. Any services in the service registry are available to all bundles because the framework is the application.
This model raises the question how to handle multiple independent applications. Do they all require their own framework? The answer is an unequivocal yes! The cost of this model with the current OSGi frameworks could be quite high. Fortunately, the OSGi CPEG is currently working on nested frameworks. Nested frameworks allow the creation of a composite bundle. This is a bundle that acts as a wormhole to another framework. Nested frameworks will have low overhead and can easily share services and packages among each other.
Nested frameworks will likely appear in a future OSGi specification. It will definitely take time to work out all the special cases but it looks very promising so far. Thomas Watson from IBM has been experimenting and the latest versions of Equinox already provide some of the behavior in experimental form. For me, this is the most exciting RFC in progress. The nested model will enable an application programming model very close to the original OSGi service oriented programming model we envisioned a decade ago. However, with this simple recursive rule of nested frameworks we do not limit it to small embedded devices but enable the same model for (very) large enterprise applications running in large application servers as well.
Peter Kriens
Comments
Enterprise Specifications
2010-01-13
I am currently in Southampton where we are finalizing the specifications for the 4.2 Enterprise release in an EEG meeting. It looks like we will be able to actually release this work during EclipseCon in Santa Clara, March 22-26. It is a sizable body of work, again. The last 8 weeks have been spent editing, editing, editing, and editing for 10-12 hours a day. Yesterday we did an (almost) final review so a few more days and then I am going to take some time off, trying to get my shoulder muscles back in a state where they can move again.
So what is likely going to be in that specification? Though I cannot give any hard guarantees, the following paragraphs give an overview of the intended content.
We had a few errata in Blueprint and some other specs, but all very minor. So most new specifications for the Enterprise release are about Java EE APIs and make them usable in OSGi. These specifications work very hard to preserve the semantics of the Java EE APIs but map them to OSGi services and defines life cycle issues. At the same time, we're trying very hard to be as compatible as possible with existing JEE code.
The hardest problem being that Java has nothing like a service registry; unfortunately most Java EE specs use the factory pattern with class loading tricks in slightly different ways. Working on the OSGi specifications has taught me a lot of things I never wanted to know about these Java EE specs.
The most "Java EEish" spec in this aspect is I guess JNDI. JNDI is a registry that has become part of Java SE. It is a surprisingly complex design for a rather simple problem (registry). This was the first design ever where I ran into a factory of factories, and JNDI even has two: InitialContextFactoryBuilder and ObjectFactoryBuilder. JNDI had to be supported because a lot of Java EE code is using JNDI to link to other subsystems and get configuration information. Key problem was that people tend to use new InitialContext(). The constructor of the InitialContext class then has to work surprisingly hard to find some Context implementation that was intended by the caller or the container.
The Initial Context design is a variation of a static factory pattern, something that does not work well with OSGi because of the dynamic life cycle. Static factories ignore dependencies, putting a huge burden on the deployer to get the ordering right. We did map the different factories to OSGi services and allow the usage of the new InitialContext(). If JNDI is really needed then depending on the JNDI Context Manager service will keep deployments simple because dependencies are managed.
For JDBC we created a Data Source Factory service that can be registered by database drivers. This service can then provide a surprisingly large number of Data Source variations: Data Source, Pooled Connection, XA Data Source, etc.
The OSGi JPA specification leverages this Data Source Factory service. JPA has become a very popular specification very quickly. The core access point for this specification the Entity Manager Factory
Transactions have been added by registering the Java Transaction Architecture (JTA) interfaces as services and allowing them to be used by applications and containers. The enlistment strategy of the resources is up to the container or by the applications themselves.
The WAR specification introduces WABs: Web Application Bundles. These bundles have the same purpose as WARs: serving web content. Part of the specification is a URL Handler that can install a WAR; the URL Handler will convert a WAR to a WAB by adding the appropriate manifest headers for OSGi. This will likely be a very popular way to get started with OSGi for developers that have a lot of experience with WARs.
This release will also support JMX (Java Management Extension). We've defined a number of MBeans that allow management of the OSGi framework and a number of the key services.
Last but definitely not least. My favorite specification is Remote Service Admin. In the previous release we specified a number of properties that enable the distribution of OSGi services. Services are very well suited to distribution; not because they were designed for distribution, but because dynamics are an intrinsic part of their design. The Remote Service Admin specification uses the distribution properties and allows a topology manager (another bundle) to manage a distributed topology of services. Topology managers can be simple like managing a number of key services in a cluster or implement fail-over or load balancing. Included in the specification is an abstraction to discover services from many different sources. This specification is leveraging OSGi to the hilt and by doing so it enables applications to be largely unaware of their distribution. This specification might be the "killer spec" for OSGi.
A key concept in OSGi remote services is configuration types. A configuration type specifies how to configure the remoting of a service to create a communications endpoint. For example, you could have a configuration type for web services. In the coming release, you will likely find an SCA configuration type. SCA being the Service Component Architecture, a specification at OASIS. SCA is a comprehensive specification to create distributed applications in many different technology. The SCA configuration type allows OSGi frameworks to play a role in SCA.
So lots of new stuff! I really hope to see a lot of people at EclipseCon when this specification will be introduced.
Peter Kriens
So what is likely going to be in that specification? Though I cannot give any hard guarantees, the following paragraphs give an overview of the intended content.
We had a few errata in Blueprint and some other specs, but all very minor. So most new specifications for the Enterprise release are about Java EE APIs and make them usable in OSGi. These specifications work very hard to preserve the semantics of the Java EE APIs but map them to OSGi services and defines life cycle issues. At the same time, we're trying very hard to be as compatible as possible with existing JEE code.
The hardest problem being that Java has nothing like a service registry; unfortunately most Java EE specs use the factory pattern with class loading tricks in slightly different ways. Working on the OSGi specifications has taught me a lot of things I never wanted to know about these Java EE specs.
The most "Java EEish" spec in this aspect is I guess JNDI. JNDI is a registry that has become part of Java SE. It is a surprisingly complex design for a rather simple problem (registry). This was the first design ever where I ran into a factory of factories, and JNDI even has two: InitialContextFactoryBuilder and ObjectFactoryBuilder. JNDI had to be supported because a lot of Java EE code is using JNDI to link to other subsystems and get configuration information. Key problem was that people tend to use new InitialContext(). The constructor of the InitialContext class then has to work surprisingly hard to find some Context implementation that was intended by the caller or the container.
The Initial Context design is a variation of a static factory pattern, something that does not work well with OSGi because of the dynamic life cycle. Static factories ignore dependencies, putting a huge burden on the deployer to get the ordering right. We did map the different factories to OSGi services and allow the usage of the new InitialContext(). If JNDI is really needed then depending on the JNDI Context Manager service will keep deployments simple because dependencies are managed.
For JDBC we created a Data Source Factory service that can be registered by database drivers. This service can then provide a surprisingly large number of Data Source variations: Data Source, Pooled Connection, XA Data Source, etc.
The OSGi JPA specification leverages this Data Source Factory service. JPA has become a very popular specification very quickly. The core access point for this specification the Entity Manager Factory
Transactions have been added by registering the Java Transaction Architecture (JTA) interfaces as services and allowing them to be used by applications and containers. The enlistment strategy of the resources is up to the container or by the applications themselves.
The WAR specification introduces WABs: Web Application Bundles. These bundles have the same purpose as WARs: serving web content. Part of the specification is a URL Handler that can install a WAR; the URL Handler will convert a WAR to a WAB by adding the appropriate manifest headers for OSGi. This will likely be a very popular way to get started with OSGi for developers that have a lot of experience with WARs.
This release will also support JMX (Java Management Extension). We've defined a number of MBeans that allow management of the OSGi framework and a number of the key services.
Last but definitely not least. My favorite specification is Remote Service Admin. In the previous release we specified a number of properties that enable the distribution of OSGi services. Services are very well suited to distribution; not because they were designed for distribution, but because dynamics are an intrinsic part of their design. The Remote Service Admin specification uses the distribution properties and allows a topology manager (another bundle) to manage a distributed topology of services. Topology managers can be simple like managing a number of key services in a cluster or implement fail-over or load balancing. Included in the specification is an abstraction to discover services from many different sources. This specification is leveraging OSGi to the hilt and by doing so it enables applications to be largely unaware of their distribution. This specification might be the "killer spec" for OSGi.
A key concept in OSGi remote services is configuration types. A configuration type specifies how to configure the remoting of a service to create a communications endpoint. For example, you could have a configuration type for web services. In the coming release, you will likely find an SCA configuration type. SCA being the Service Component Architecture, a specification at OASIS. SCA is a comprehensive specification to create distributed applications in many different technology. The SCA configuration type allows OSGi frameworks to play a role in SCA.
So lots of new stuff! I really hope to see a lot of people at EclipseCon when this specification will be introduced.
Peter Kriens
Comments
ekkescorner
:
this sounds really great and will empower the development of OSGI enterprise business application.
looking forward to EclipseCon.
ekke
looking forward to EclipseCon.
ekke
Wolfgang Schell
:
Hi Peter,
this all sounds great. I hope, there will be a new preview of the specs available, after editing is finished.
Have a nice time off.
Wolfgang
this all sounds great. I hope, there will be a new preview of the specs available, after editing is finished.
Have a nice time off.
Wolfgang
João Assunção
:
Hi there,
I have one question regarding remote services in OSGI. Do you think Jini can have a comeback and be used as one of the possible remoting technologies in OSGI?
Joao
I have one question regarding remote services in OSGI. Do you think Jini can have a comeback and be used as one of the possible remoting technologies in OSGI?
Joao
Peter Kriens
:
I think Jini is not very interesting with remote services, there is clearly an overlap. However, Jini can easily be used on its own. Mapping Jini services to OSGi services and vice-versa is quite straightforward.
pirx
:
Thanks a lot for all the hard work on the 4.2 Enterprise Release (and on OSGi in general).
I'm using the JMX part (along with the Aries JMX implementation) and have some concerns/remarks with respect to overloaded JMX operations (e.g. two variants of FrameworkMBean.installBundle()).
My question is, where is the best place to post my comments to ?
thanx ....
...roland
I'm using the JMX part (along with the Aries JMX implementation) and have some concerns/remarks with respect to overloaded JMX operations (e.g. two variants of FrameworkMBean.installBundle()).
My question is, where is the best place to post my comments to ?
thanx ....
...roland
Wolfgang Schell
:
At Eclipse, things are a bit easier since we follow the same set of guidelines and semantics. I admire your goal of trying to create flexible versioning policies for people to choose via BND.
I don't know what it is, but it seems in the software industry, we have taken such a "laissez faire" attitude towards versions. I can count the people I've talked to over the years on one hand that cared about versioning things properly.
Anyways, enough ranting, good post.
As a side note, I like your bnd experiments, the only thing I see that is still missing (which I don't know how to easily solve either) is the picking up of the smallest possible version compatible. BND of course takes the one found in the path, but there might be others as well. Using always the latest and greatest in your build is a serious problem in finding the lowest possible working version (of course you want to benefit from new versions if possible). We had that issue for a while and for that reason decided to drop import version ranges at all, because they indicated a miss leading sophistication and preventing the use in older applications (f.i. servlet version 2.5 if none of these features where actually used). Hard to come by I guess.
@Chris Yes, Eclipse already helps people a lot. Unfortunately it also distracts people when applying versions in PDE. For instance, when adding an Import-Package, the Manifest Editor just pulls the exported version (including all version parameters). This leads (if used naively) to implementation dependencies not necessary. There is also no notion of an implementor or client, but hey it is still one of the best tools we have so far, so don't get me wrong. Just saying there is still a long way ahead of us.
bnd has lots of features that are unfortunately not documented (due to lack of any financial incentive to spent time on this) but that are actually successfully used in the OSGi build. This is a non-trivial build with 1300 bundles from about 130 projects.
In this build, bnd has a -buildpath, which is a list of bundle symolic name version range, just like a package import. Compilations (and the build process) are ran against the LOWEST version granted by the bnd file. This automatically makes bnd have an affinity for a low base version. However testing (which bnd supports with JUnit and the launching API, both in Eclipse JUnit and ant) uses the latest permitted versions. This model seems to work very well and increases the overall robustness because you prevent the version brittleness problem but you test against the most up to date libraries.
"I can count the people I've talked to over the years on one hand that cared about versioning things properly." The problem with this is "properly" is subjective.
We (You, Peter, Boris etc) know that versioning semantics must be tied to compatibility, but most of the world doesn't realize this. Many people probably assume they are versioning things "properly" and in their mind they are. (Whatever "properly" means in their organization)
We need more education around why versioning and compatibility must go hand-in-hand. Articles like this are great! Next week I'm giving a lecture on this topic at the local University -- Peter, I might borrow some of your material ;).
@Ian Bull:
Educating about the role of proper versioning may help but I guess it will always do so only partially as long as developers are people (which I hope *will* be long :) Without being cheeky, we have found improperly versioned bundles in the core of one well known OSGi implementation...
What I believe would help substantially is to take the burden of correct versioning off the shoulders of the developers. We have a preliminary OSGi version generator which works on standalone bundles (search for "osgi+version" on dss.kiv.zcu.cz). Would something like this make people willing to follow the rules?