Toni Epple's Blog

There’s a lot of interest in Distributed OSGi, part of OSGi Spec 4.2. The idea is to make it transparent to your bundle if a service is local or remote. That’s nice, because you can use the same code e.g. on the server where you can access a local service as on the client, where you access the service on the server remotely. The Apache CFX installation also exposes the service as a webservice, so you could call it from a regular webservice client, e.g. from a NetBeans platform app.

But why make it so complicated, with netigso around the corner it should be a breeze to get this working in NetBeans directly without the need to create webservice clients at all… To get started I downloaded the single bundle version (I’m lazy) of the reference implementation and followed the tutorial for setting it up on felix. So I downloaded the compendium interfaces and put both files in a directory named “DOSGi” in folder modules. Then I used the clusterize ANT task (ant -f /<netigso>/harness/suite.xml clusterize -Dcluster=DOSGi -Dincludes=modules/** ) and imported the cluster to a NetBeans Platform application (application project -> properties-> libraries-> add Cluster).

Next I replaced the version 1.4.1 felix.jar in my netigso platform build with a version 1.8. To see if everything is fine I also installed the remote shell (thanks Sven!) and fired up my app. Connected to the shell (telnet localhost 6666), then issued a “ps” and voila:

Felix Remote Shell Console:
============================

-> ps
START LEVEL 1
ID   State         Level  Name
[   0] [Active     ] [    0] System Bundle (1.8.0)
[   1] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.bootstrap/1 (2.18)
[   2] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.modules (7.10)
[   3] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.util (7.22.0)
[   4] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.core.startup/1 (1.15.0)
[   5] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.core.netigso (1.0)
[   6] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.filesystems (7.21.0)
[   7] [Installed  ] [    1] org.jdesktop.layout/1 (1.7.0)
[   8] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.api.annotations.common/1 (1.0)
[   9] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.api.progress/1 (1.13.0)
[  10] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.core.windows/2 (2.14.0)
[  11] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.core/2 (3.11.0)
[  12] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.libs.jna/1 (1.2)
[  13] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.libs.junit4 (1.4)
[  14] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.editor.mimelookup/1 (1.11)
[  15] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.javahelp/1 (2.12)
[  16] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.masterfs/2 (2.16)
[  17] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.options.api/1 (1.12)
[  18] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.options.keymap (1.5)
[  19] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.print (7.0)
[  20] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.queries/1 (1.14)
[  21] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.sendopts/2 (2.4)
[  22] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.settings/1 (1.18.0)
[  23] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.modules.spi.actions/1 (1.0)
[  24] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.spi.quicksearch (1.1)
[  25] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.swing.outline (1.4)
[  26] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.swing.plaf (1.9)
[  27] [Installed  ] [    1] org.netbeans.swing.tabcontrol (1.15)
[  28] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.actions (6.9.0)
[  29] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.awt (7.8.0)
[  30] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.dialogs (7.10)
[  31] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.explorer (6.18.0)
[  32] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.io (1.16)
[  33] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.loaders (7.5)
[  34] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.nodes (7.9.0)
[  35] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.text (6.22)
[  36] [Installed  ] [    1] org.openide.windows (6.26)
[  37] [Active     ] [    1] OSGi R4 Compendium Bundle (4.1.0)
[  38] [Active     ] [    1] Apache Felix Remote Shell (1.0.4)
[  39] [Active     ] [    1] Apache Felix Shell Service (1.2.0)
[  40] [Active     ] [    1] Distributed OSGi Distribution Software Single-Bundle Distribution (1.0)

DOSGi is running. Since I was eager to see if things work without digging into the details of DOSGi configuration I simply installed one of the samples:

-> start http://repo2.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/cxf/dosgi/samples/cxf-dosgi-ri-samples-greeter-interface/1.0/cxf-dosgi-ri-samples-greeter-interface-1.0.jar
-> start http://repo2.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/cxf/dosgi/samples/cxf-dosgi-ri-samples-greeter-impl/1.0/cxf-dosgi-ri-samples-greeter-impl-1.0.jar

…and now I’ve got this:

So enough for today… Tomorrow I’ll try to install that on glassfish and make my NetBeans app a client. (Or in case Glassfish’s felix version is too old, I’ll use NetBeans as client and server)