After spending a couple of days trying to implement this myself, I quited :). kudos to Don
I will be playing with it soon :) musachy On 7/29/07, Don Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Writing an OSGi plugin for Struts 2 has been something I've been > playing with on and off since I put in place the Struts 2 plugin > architecture, and I finally completed an end-to-end functional spike > of such a beast. My motivation for a Struts 2 OSGi plugin is to easily > allow Struts 2 developers to write their applications such that they > can install, upgrade, and uninstall sections of it at a time without > restarting or reloading the whole application or application server. > Think how nice it would be to install a new admin tool in your public, > heavily-used web application without affecting any users, or fixing a > critical bug without, again, taking the application down even for a > few seconds. > > The Struts 2 OSGi plugin allows you to separate your application into > jars (called bundles), each containing a struts.xml file, Action > classes, and Velocity (for now) files. Just by adding a few lines in > the jar's manifest.mf: > > Bundle-Activator: org.apache.struts2.osgi.StrutsActivator > Export-Package: com.mycompany.myapp.actions > Bundle-Version: 1.0.0 > Bundle-SymbolicName: foo.actions > > The jar is ready to be deployed. Drop the jar into the > /WEB-INF/classes/bundles directory and it will automatically be > installed when the application starts up. > > As this was a spike, there are a bunch of limitations and missing > features such as: > * Only Velocity templates are supported > * Application classes, including third-party jars such as Spring, will > probably not be available in bundles > * No GUI to install, upgrade, and uninstall bundles at runtime > * Bundles cannot contain beans or constants (will probably never be allowed) > * Most likely improper OSGi usage > > Still, the code is functional and available in the Struts sandbox: > > http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/struts/sandbox/trunk/struts2-osgi-plugin/ > > One of my side goals in this project is to hide as much of OSGi from > the Struts 2 developer as possible, so that bundles will be easy to > write and deploy. Therefore, there is probably a lot of OSGi that is > hidden, which OSGi experts would lament, but the main goal is to allow > Struts actions to be hot deployable, and I think this plugin could > make it happen. > > Don > > -- copied from my blog post for those too lazy to click links: > http://www.jroller.com/mrdon/entry/struts_2_osgi_plugin_spike > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- "Hey you! Would you help me to carry the stone?" Pink Floyd --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
