Hello,

I would like to see in this book some descriptions of and solutions to the following issues I have experienced with using OSGi so far:

1. Instantiating an object via Spring.
Here a bean is declared in a spring XML file, and the type of the bean is implemented in a class that is in a bundle. I have been doing this in the context of eclipse RCP applications, and to make it work, I had to:
a) Take the spring JAR file and create a bundle out of it
b) In the new spring bundle I had to edit the manifest file and declare the bundle as "registered"
c) In the bundle that contains the implementation class, I have to register the spring module as a buddy (with the Eclipse-RegisterBuddy directive).

This all seems cumbersome. Is this something eclipse or OSGi specific? Does OSGi offer a better/simpler way?

2. Suppose I have a trading application GUI that allows the end user to create strategies. I would like this framework to be extensible, so when a strategy is created, the user can enter the name/path to a module that implements the strategy. So the end user might write some class that implements a Strategy interface, create a bundle out of it, and this bundle must be available to the application. All this without having to stop/restart the application.

How can such mechanism be implemented with OSGi?

Best regards,
Levente

I am not sure what to say about (1), but for (2) this is pretty much what we are doing with the paint example in chapters 3 and 4. In ch3 we use the bundle lifecycle layer to provide extensibility (i.e., the extender pattern) and in ch4 we use services to provide extensibility.

If you wanted the user to be able to install bundles dynamically, then you just need to create a GUI to allow them to specify where the bundle is located or you could create a directory you monitor and simply have them copy it in there. Internally, once you have a new bundle from the user, you call BundleContext.installBundle() (and probably Bundle.start()) to make it available at run time.