Hi Serge,
The main benefits I see are:
-modularity: now our applications are composed of small modules adding
specific functionality (e.g. scheduling, reporting,...). You don't need
to use the whole stack but just those needed for your particular
application (or those for which a customer has paid for;-).
-pluggability. For instance, just by "dropping" a new bundle into the
OSGi runtime all tables in our applications can suddenly export
themselves to excel or pdf, or by adding another bundle tables can save
snapshots of themselves, or a new bundle may add menu entries to the
main application flow. All this without the need to stop the
application. This is possible because many of our components consult
some services, acting as extension points, at the time of building
themselves. The bundles adding extra functionality can have also
"extension points" that you can use to configure them (e.g. you may
define exactly how you want to export to PDF or excel (headers,
colors, and so on). So it opens up a lot of possibilities...
Ernesto
Serge Libotte wrote:
Hi Ernesto,
You tell about some problems you met but could you summarize the benefits
you had by adopting OSGI?
Thanks,
Serge.
2007/11/14, Ernesto Reinaldo Barreiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
We have gather some experience on using wicket and OSGi: we have been
using them together for almost a year now. Instead of going the PAX way
we chose to tie ourselves to equinox implementation of OSGi and we use
some eclipse extensions to avoid class loading problems (look for
*Eclipse*-*RegisterBuddy* header on manifest files). We have encountered
all kinds of class loading related problems (e.g. when you want to
integrate Hibernate into the picture or deploying the applicition into a
"real" application server) but after having dealt with all these
problems we are quite happy with the decision of going OSGi.
Additionally, if you use eclipse 3.3. for development, it comes with a
plugin version of Jetty that is quite handy for development...
AFAIK if you plan to deploy your application in a "real" application
server you will have to use equinox anyway because is the only
implementation providing a Bridge servlet (that allows to start an OSGi
runtime insede your application server). Here we have had class loading
problems well as (in some application servers) you cannot simply do a
JNDI lookup from withing a not WEB thread...
Best regards,
Ernesto
Thies Edeling wrote:
Hello all,
Does anyone have any experience with using Wicket and OSGi? I'm
looking for the most flexible way of composing an application and
deploying Wicket pages/panels as OSGi bundles seems like a nice way.I
noticed the Pax Wicket project but am not sure how stable that is.
regards,
Thies
