More on OSGi...

I was introduced to OSGi quite by coincidence. While searching for standardized approaches for using standards and techniques for an architecture approach, I started looking into it. I was quite surprised to find the ease with which it provided the solutions to some of the problems that we face in the web application development.

One of the concepts of OSGi that really intrigued me, was how it allows bundles to export services that can be consumed by other bundles without knowing anything about the exporting bundle.

OSGi takes care of this by introducing Service Registry where the exporting bundle registers the interfaces that it want to expose and any other bundle which wants to use those interface can just look up in the registry to use the implementation.

The other concept of OSGi which I also found interesting was how OSGi uses version management to allow different versions of the same java class to be used within the project.

The OSGi notion is crucial in web oriented solutions and special in SOA, ESB and java related projects. As reposted the OSGi begins to be adopted by various tools. The SeviceMix4 case is also used in the FUSE ESB 4 case, which is an enterprise version of Apache ServiceMix 4. ServiceMix 4 supports OSGi but does not fully support JBI, and therefore the FUSE team recommends that developers who have been using FUSE ESB 3 or JBI continue to use FUSE ESB 3. Users of OSGi should use FUSE ESB 4. The 4.1 release of both ServiceMix and FUSE ESB will fully support both JBI and OSGi.

FUSE ESB 4 continues to provide support for widely adopted integration standards like JBI 1.0 and JMS while also ensuring support for the latest emerging standards like OSGi and JBI 2.0. The new FUSE ESB 4 provides a single platform that makes it easy for developers to implement the integration patterns they need with the programming model of their choice.

FUSE ESB 4 includes the following features not included in FUSE ESB 3:

• Normalized message router – a standard way for components to plug in and talk to the ESB, now supports multiple programming models in addition to JBI
• OSGi framework – a faster and standard way to create, deploy, and easily provision integration components as modules
• JBI 1.0 and 2.0 compatibility – support for the latest version of the emerging JBI 2.0 standard and backwards compatibility with JBI 1.0 so components developed for FUSE/ServiceMix 3.x can be seamlessly deployed onto FUSE ESB 4
• Native Spring support – enables Spring users to quickly create components using Spring XML
• FUSE Integration Designer – graphical user interface to integrate systems using Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs)

Actually, the Integration Designer is the difference from the alone-ServiceMix4. And the approach provides a hind on using Open Source in a more professional manner.

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