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Appendix B. OSGi Best Practices
Abstract
The combination of Maven and the OSGi framework provides a sophisticated framework for building and deploying enterprise applications. In order to use this framework effectively, however, it is necessary to adopt certain conventions and best practices. The practices described in this appendix are intended to optimize the manageability and scalability of your OSGi applications.
B.1. OSGi Tooling
Overview
The following best practices are recommended for OSGi related tools and utilities:
Use the Maven bundle plug-in to generate the Manifest
Even for a moderately sized bundle project, it is usually impractical to create and maintain a bundle Manifest by hand. The Maven bundle plug-in is the most effective tool for automating the generation of bundle Manifests in a Maven project. See Section B.2, “Building OSGi Bundles”.
Avoid using the OSGi API directly
Avoid using the OSGi Java API directly. Prefer a higher level technology, for example: Blueprint (from the OSGi Compendium Specification), Spring-DM, Declarative Services (DS), iPojo, and so on.
Prefer Blueprint over Spring-DM
The Blueprint container is now the preferred framework for instantiating, registering, and referencing OSGi services, because this container has now been adopted as an OSGi standard. This ensures greater portability for your OSGi service definitions in the future.
Spring Dynamic Modules (Spring-DM) provided much of the original impetus for the definition of the Blueprint standard, but should now be regarded as obsolescent. Using the Blueprint container does not prevent you from using the Spring framework: the latest version of Spring is compatible with Blueprint.
Use Apache Karaf features to group bundles together
When an application is composed of a large number of bundles, it becomes essential to group bundles together in order to deploy them efficiently. Apache Karaf features is a mechanism that is designed just for this purpose. It is easy to use and supported by a variety of different tools. See Chapter 8, Deploying Features for details.
Use the OSGi Configuration Admin service
The OSGi Configuration Admin service is the preferred mechanism for providing configuration properties to your application. This configuration mechanism enjoys better tooling support than other approaches. For example, in Red Hat JBoss Fuse the OSGi Configuration Admin service is supported in the following ways:
- Properties integrated with Spring XML files.
- Properties automatically read from configuration files,
etc/persistendId.cfg - Properties can be set in feature repositories.
Use PAX-Exam for testing
In order for testing to be really effective, you should run at least some of your tests in an OSGi container. This requires you to start an OSGi container, configure its environment, install prerequisite bundles, and install the actual test. Performing these steps manually for every test would make testing prohibitively difficult and time-consuming. Pax-Exam solves this problem by providing a testing framework that is capable of automatically initializing an OSGi container before running tests in the container.
See Appendix C, Pax-Exam Testing Framework for more details.
