Re: Jini vs/and OSGi

Niclas Hedhman <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.java.sun.jini
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Saturday 31 March 2007 04:20, Calum Shaw-Mackay wrote:
> Okay, as I see it (not necessarily how everyone else sees it) Jini and
> OSGi do significantly _different_ things by primarily messing around
> in the same _area_ of Java - classloaders.

Yes.

> Just because two technologies use the same tricks does not make them:
> a) fundamentally the same
> b) competitors in the same technology space
> c) unusable together in some form

Correct.

Personally, I think there are only a handful things that need to be addressed
to allow for high synergistic effects;

 1. Jini should define a classloading delegation model, better than the
RMIClassloaderSpi. Paremus should be able to give a lot of insight here.

 2. OSGi's classloading needs to be adjusted for mobile code requirements. The
issue here is that the bundle that will handle the Jini network will be
generic, and agnostic of the classes being involved. That means such bundle
will have difficulty importing the classes needed to deserialize the service
proxy. One solution could be to change OSGi so that it could create a virtual
bundle on the fly, and it would do the imports/exports and servcie
registrations it needs. A similar requirement is being worked on by the SCA
workstream in the EEG.

 3. OSGi uses LDAP expressions to lookup service properties (service entries),
has a richer set of types (strings, arrays, maps) and allows for custom types
of data. Jini (unless something changed since I last worked with it) allows
for custom types, but no arrays and maps. IF Jini would embrace expressions,
arrays and maps, then Great. If not, I think most OSGi programmers are
normally only using plain Strings anyway, and if such a constraint is placed
upon them if they want Jini service exposure, I think it would be acceptable
to most.


Cheers
--
Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer

I  live here; http://tinyurl.com/2qq9er
I  work here; http://tinyurl.com/2ymelc
I relax here; http://tinyurl.com/2cgsug

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