I Love OSGi, Now Please Change It!

I'm sitting in the OSGi DevCon where a panel are discussing what needs to change in OSGi. Several points are coming up that are relevant to OSGi standards and also to what we have been doing in Virgo.

One excellent question was posed by a panel member, IBM Distinguished Engineer Ian Robinson, who asked whether OSGi needs to distinguish better between APIs intended for applications and APIs intended for middleware implementers and how this squares with the OSGi tendency for all bundles to be created equal.

I believe the answer here is to use composite bundles or nested frameworks to provide a unit of modularity larger than an individual bundle. I don't think OSGi needs to prescribe which APIs fall into each category, but it should provide mechanisms for hiding APIs in a given environment which are not intended for application use.

Virgo uses an early prototype of nested frameworks to achieve this kind of isolation between the Virgo kernel and the user region, which is a nested framework in which applications run. Users are free to deploy bundles in the user region and can even install additional bundles into the kernel and configure the packages and services shared between the kernel and the user region.

Fortunately, the notion of composite bundles and nested frameworks is being actively developed in the OSGi standards work and so their mechanisms should become more broadly available in a standard form in due course.

There is also OSGi standards work going on to expose these mechanisms in a usable way to applications. Virgo provides plans and plan archives as a way of grouping together artefacts for deployment and management. Apache Aries has also been implementing some similar grouping mechanisms with their application model. Paremus and others have similar constructs. So the standardisation activity has plenty of implementation experience and exposure to users to inform it. Virgo has also introduced a scoping mechanism as a way of isolating groups of application bundles from other groups of application bundles. This will also feed into the standards work.

Another great question from another panel member, the OSGi consultant Neil Bartlett, was how much OSGi should accommodate and support legacy code and how much it should require legacy code to be restructured to be more modular.

The direction of the Enterprise Expert Group in recent years has been to accommodate porting Java EE applications to an OSGi environment and then modularising them.

Virgo has had support for legacy code as one of the main design points from its inception. The Virgo kernel implements solutions to several knotty problems which crop up regularly when using non-OSGi libraries in an OSGi environment. These are assumptions about thread context class loading, load time weaving, class path scanning, and implicit package use.

So using implementations of OSGi Enterprise specifications is one part of the answer as is providing the kind of support for legacy libraries like that available in Virgo.

Virgo and Ocean Observatories Initiative

Virgo seems to be finding its way into the scientific community. A research hospital and a networking research group already use Virgo heavily. It seems that an oceanography group are also considering Virgo for their "ioncore-java" runtime.

They are at the stage of comparing various application servers. The front-runners, at least in terms of their feature comparison table, are Virgo and WSO2. Fortunately, I believe the architecture and design of these products are quite different, so this should make the decision easier.

Virgo was built from the ground up as OSGi bundles and offers first class support for OSGi applications. The Virgo kernel is independent of any particular communications protocol. Tomcat is added as part of the Virgo web server which sits on top of the kernel. The whole of Virgo runs inside an OSGi container. Web services can be supported on Virgo, but it's not something Virgo has majored on as this is just one of the features available in the Spring portfolio running on Virgo.

WSO2 on the other hand is focussed on - and the clue's in the name here - web services. It is constructed as an interoperating network of web services components. WSO2 does support OSGi, but it hosts an OSGi container inside Tomcat.

Let's see what the Ocean Observatories Initiative regard as the key requirements for their component model. If it's OSGi components with primarily local communication (i.e. Java method call), then I reckon Virgo would be ideal. If on the other hand they want a primarily distributed component model (and it's a big if) with web services as the communication protocol, then WSO2 may be a good choice.

One last word. I felt a bit sorry for Glassfish as it didn't get a tick in the J2EE box even though it's the J2EE reference implementation. Also Tomcat is the servlet engine used by Virgo, so it deserves just as much of a J2EE tick in the box as Virgo. Similarly JBoss should get the J2EE tick.