"I know you guys are very busy, but it would be nice if the most experienced Jini/River software engineers were able to dissect the [OSGi] RFC 119 and provide an assessment as to how or if it is "suited" for Jini/River. I know it's tough to allocate time to do that though."
Well, in the absence of the most experienced you're left with me. :-) For added confusion, I don't know a whole heap about OSGi either, so the follow is a likely mix of over simplification and misunderstanding. If that sounds useful, continue reading... This is the complete document, I skipped down to RFC 119 only; http://www.osgi.org/download/osgi-4.2-early-draft.pdf The RFC discusses the concept of a "Service Registry" which looks an awful lot like a River ServiceRegistrar. Delving further into the RFC it seems to me that we if we can translate from the specified interfaces that describe an "OSGi Service" to that which describes a "River Service" then River could slot in quite nicely as a response to this RFC. Much of the work feels like translating from what OSGi say service descriptions and lookups *should* look like and what River says service descriptions and lookups *do* look like. The only tricky part, I think, would be how an OSGi component (which likely extends something else) can be made into a River service such that it is discoverable in the usual way. This would be an interesting problem and raises the circumstance where an OSGi service might publish itself as an OSGi service, but because it's River underneath, would be discoverable by pure River clients on the same network also. Looking at how the RFC specifies what a service description is and what it looks like, I think that there is mileage in River adopting something similar. It would be nice, in my opinion, to move away from the quasi-java config files River uses in favour of something else. XML makes sense because that's what most of the rest of the world uses - although I personally don't care for it much. Someone on the Jini-Users (or similar, I can't quite remember) a while ago was talking about using Groovy classes to describe service configuration. Something like this sounds pretty neat, but anything that needs to be recompiled for changes can take affect is likely to be unworkable for obvious reasons. Also, building in a mechanism to provide a similar version-sensitive lookup mechanism would 1) fit with OSGi nicely and 2) be a useful feature for River all other considerations not-withstanding. Anyway, that's this layman's interpretation of this OSGi RFC; if only for a few days or weeks of spare time to spend putting it together. Tom www.sucdenfinancial.com Sucden Financial Limited, Plantation Place South, 60 Great Tower Street, London EC3R 5AZ Telephone +44 203 207 5000 Registered in England no. 1095841 VAT registration no. GB 446 9061 33 Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and entered in the FSA register under no. 114239 This email, including any files transmitted with it, is confidential and may be privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, please notify [email protected] immediately and delete it from your computer system. We believe, but do not warrant, that this email and its attachments are virus-free, but you should check. Sucden Financial Limited may monitor traffic data of both business and personal emails. By replying to this email, you consent to Sucden Financial 's monitoring the content of any emails you send to or receive from Sucden Financial . Sucden Financial is not liable for any opinions expressed by the sender where this is a non-business email. The contents of this e-mail do not constitute advice and should not be regarded as a recommendation to buy, sell or otherwise deal with any particular investment. This message has been scanned for viruses by Mimecast.
