Service Binder

Simplifying application development on the OSGi services platform

Authors: Humberto Cervantes, Richard S. Hall

Summary

The Service Binder is a mechanism that simplifies development in the OSGi services platform as it automates service dependency management.

OSGi applications are constructed following service-orientation principles, and as consequence they require developers to build components that are responsible for publishing their services, discovering and binding to services they require and adapting to the dynamic availability (the arrival or departure) of the services they are using; all of this during execution. These activities represent service dependency management.

Traditionnally, bundle developers must program both application and service dependency management logic into their bundles. Service dependency management logic is, in general, complex and error prone, as it requires, among other things, that monitoring and reconfiguration tasks to be realized. Additionnally, application and service dependency management logic are often intermixed inside the code of a bundle, making modifications more difficult.

The Service Binder solves this problem by extracting service dependency management logic from the bundles and moving it into an execution environment that is deployed inside the framework as a standard bundle. Service dependency management logic is configured by informations contained in an XML descriptor that extends the bundle manifest. This logic is inserted seamlessly into a bundle by providing a descriptor and creating an empty subclass from a generic activator class provided by the Service Binder. Applications built with the Service Binder are assembled dynamically and are capable of adapting themselves autonomously, for example by substituting a departing service, or by integrating new services that arrive as the application is being executed.

The Service Binder is delivered in a standard OSGi bundle (~70k) and is independent of any OSGi framework implementation. It has been used in companies such as Schneider Electric and Ascert to develop research and commercial products, respectively.

Links

• Concepts: Details about the concepts behind the Service Binder are explained.

• Building dynamically extensible applications: Discusses how plug-in applications based on Service Binder components can be built.

• Java API: Browse the Service Binder's 1.1 framework API (see Version 1.0).

• Publication: "Automating Service Dependency Management in a Service-Oriented Component Model", presented at the ICSE CBSE6 Workshop, 2003.

• OSGi and Service Binder tutorial: This tutorial explains the basics of building applications with OSGi and shows the benefits of using the Service Binder.

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