R-Osgi provides us a way to call service from a remote OGSi container. WebSite: http://r-osgi.sourceforge.net.
I'm new to R-OSGi and now I want to split my OSGi container into small ones and interact each other by R-Osgi because it's too huge. But it seems R-OSGi only provides a way for Registered Service. We know that the most popular way to interaction between 2 bundles besides Service, "exported-package" is also widely used.
So, is there anyone familiar with R-OSGi and know how to use "exported-package" from remote OSGi container?
Thanks for any response.
If you think about it, attempting to handle the remote importing/exporting of packages is very complex, fragile and prone to error; you'd need to send all bundle lifecycle events over the wire, and honour them in the importing system (which would require caching).
Additionally the framework would need to know ahead of time to use these class definitions (you cannot instantiate a class that references classes that aren't available to your classloader). A remote bundle's classloader may depend on classes from another classloader, this chain could go round and round a network making classloading take ages.
Put another way; your local bundles will never resolve without the class definitions they depend on, and considering there could be thousands+ of potential remote exporters on a network/hardware with very poor SLA, this wouldn't scale well or be very robust considering the fallacies of distributed computing.
If we tried to do remote packages, the framework would need to import all exported packages from all available remote nodes and then select just one to import each bundle export from (this would be arbitrary and if the select node goes down, the whole import remote package process would have to triggered again).
What you need to do is separate you api/interfaces from your implementation, you then distribute the api bundle to all nodes that need it and then use dOSGi to import services.
Apologies if this unclear or waffly but it should explain why it's simply not practical to have remote exported packages.
On a side note; I'm not sure if r-osgi is being actively maintained or is up-to-date with the latest Remote Services Admin spec, from looking at the last commit to SVN trunk was 14/02/2011. There's some alternative dOSGi implementations listed here (but avoid CXF).
EDIT: In terms of deployment, distributing your bundles (and configuration) can be done from an OBR (there are number of public ones and several implementations Felix/Eclipse), or a maven repository can be reappropriated with pax url handler.
Related
I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this question, but I'm trying to learn gRPC/protobufs in the context of a web application. I am building the UI in Flutter, and the backend in Go with MongoDB. I was able to get a simple go service running and I was able to query it using Kreya, however my question now is - how do I integrate the UI with the backend? In order to make the Kreya call, I needed to import the protobufs. Do I need to maintain identical protobufs in both the front end and backend? Meaning, do I literally have to copy all of my protobufs in the backend into my UI codebase and compile locally there as well? This seems like a nightmare to maintain, as now the protobufs have to be maintained in two places, as opposed to one.
What is the best way to maintain the protobufs?
Yes, but think of the protos as a shared (contract) between your clients and servers.
The protos define the interface by which the client is able to communicate with the server. In order for this to be effective, the client and server need to implement the same interface.
One way to do this is to store your protos in a repo that you share in any clients and servers that implement it. This provides a single source of truth of the protos. I also generate copies of the protos compiled (protoc) to the languages I will use e.g. Golang, Dart etc. in this shared protos repo and import from the repo where needed.
Then, in your case, the client imports the Dart-generated sources and the Golang server imports the Golang-generated sources from the shared repo.
Alternatively, your client and your server could protoc compile appropriate sources when they need them, on-the-fly, usually as part of an automated build process.
Try not to duplicate the protos across clients and servers because it will make it challenging to maintain consistency; it will be challenging to ensure every copy remains synchronized.
I have implemented 2 services A,B in my bundle. I would like to change the code of service A by building a new jar file and do update command but keep the service B running without start it again.
Sounds like you have 2 services in 1 bundle. The unit of deployment is a bundle, so my recommendation is to split the two services into two bundles. Otherwise, undeploying your existing bundle will naturally also tear down Service B.
Alternatively, in case the API/interface resides in a separate bundle, you could deploy a new service-implementation for A in a separate bundle, with a higher priority, and rewire all uses of the service. Which typically is rather confusing, so it's a distant second place recommendation.
Edit: You comment that you are combining services in a bundle to minimize the number of jars, but you want to update the services independently. Specifically for minimizing the number of jars: Are you trying to solve a problem that you indeed had? I'm mainly working with Liferay, which is fully OSGi, and a plain vanilla installation comes with more than 1000 bundles - the runtime handles it just fine. Make sure you're not preemptively optimizing something that doesn't need optimization.
If your components have different maintenance intervals, then deploy them in different bundles. Period. No use working against the system, which has no problem with the number of bundles at all.
In my company, we have a system organized with microservices with a dedicated git repository per service. We would like to introduce gRPC and we were wondering how to share protobuf files and build libs for our various languages. Based on some examples we collected, we decided at the end to go for a single repository with all our protobuf inside, it seems the most common way of doing it and it seems easier to maintain and use.
I would like to know if you have some examples on your side ?
Do you have some counter examples of companies doing the exact opposite, meaning hosting protobuf in a distributed way ?
We have a distinct repo for protofiles (called schema) and multiple repos for every microservice. Also we never store generated code. Server and client files are generated from scratch by protoc during every build on CI.
Actually this approach works and fits our needs well. But there are two potential pitfalls:
Inconsistency between schema and microservice repositories. Commits to two different git repos are not atomic, so, at the time of schema updates, there is always a little time period when schema is updated, while microservice's repo is not yet.
In case if you use Go, there is a potential problem of moving to Go modules introduced in Go 1.11. We didn't make a comprehensive research on it yet.
Each of our microservices has it's own API (protobuf or several protobuf files). For each API we have separate repository. Also we have CI job which build protoclasses into jar (and not only for Java but for another language too) and publish it into our central repository. Than you just add dependencies to API you need.
For example, we have microservice A, we also have repository a-api (contains only protofiles) which build by job into jar (and to another languages) com.api.a-service.<version>
I want to create a production management system to be used by a small manufacturing firm. The system will allow to document different stages in manufacturing of equipment. The requirements are as follows:
1.Non browser based interface.Need something like Swing or AWT based.While i understand the convenience of implementing a browser based solution,the business owner insists on a non browser interface
2.Accessed from multiple systems.These systems will allow CRUD operations on the central system (Thin Client?)
3.The application will not have more than 3 concurrent users.
I need some advice regarding what would be a good path for this kind of application.Currently, i'm thinking of using Griffon with RMI. However, i don't have much development experience.Read a bit about Apache River (Jini) too.Would it be a good idea to use Griffon with RMI?
Please provide some advice. Thanks.
EDIT:after some reading, i've decided to use more mainstream frameworks.So, Griffon is not an option. How about Jini(Apache River) or OSGI (Apache Felix)?
Hmm how is that a project which recently moved out of the incubation phase be considered mainstream vs a project that's been used in production for more than 3 years now? Anyway, Apache River gives you access to Jini technology and nothing more; meaning you can't achieve item #1 of your list with River alone. River may use RMI for accessing remote resources, however you can use RMI directly, or try out DRMI, Kryonet, Hessian/Burlap, Spring's HTTP Invoker, Protocol Buffers, Avro/Thrift, REST, SOAP, ZMQ and many more.
Even if you choose one of these options and/or River you still have to define the following things
application structure (file structure and runtime behavior)
build setup
dependency management
testing profiles
packaging
deployment strategies
These things and more are what Griffon brings to the table. As you may have noticed the framework allows you to build up applications by adding plugins, reducing thew amount of time you must allot for hunting down dependencies, setting up bootstrap mechanism and getting things done. On the subject of remoting technologies have a look at the different options Griffon has to offer http://artifacts.griffon-framework.org/tags/plugin/remoting
Even more, you can also combine OpenDolphin (http://open-dolphin.org/dolphin_website/Home.html) with Griffon. There's even an example application found at the opendolhpin repository showing a full client-server application (build with Griffon, Grails and OpenDolphin) https://github.com/canoo/open-dolphin/tree/master/dolphin-griffon-crud
With what seems to be your current understanding of the problem, I would not recommend OSGI, especially for a small manufacturing firm (Possible maintenance issues, depending on the "personel").
The main reason why I wouldn't advocate JINI or OSGI in your case is because of what you said
However, i don't have much development experience.
JINI (Apache River) is a viable option as long as you fully understand the concepts of LookupService and service registrations, etc. There's tons of RMI going on here with possible firewall implications...
OSGI is not difficult but you may have issues deciding how to structure your applications as well as interacting with services, etc.
Try to stick to the simplest approach that you can handle for the implementation (Flexible design in mind): Make it work and then improve it.
There are simple Web Services options such as Spring Remoting (over http/https for example), unless Spring introduces too many concepts and headaches for your app.
We are developing a web-application (lets call it an image bank) for which we have identified the following needs:
The application caters customers which consist of a set of users.
A new customer can be created dynamically and a customer manages it's users
Customers have different feature sets which can be changed dynamically
Customers can develop their own features and have them deployed.
The application is homogeneous and has a current version, but version lifting of customers can still be handled individually.
The application should be managed as a whole and customers share the resources which should be easy to scale.
Question: Should we build this on a standard OSGi framework or would we be better of using one of the emerging application frameworks (Virgo, Aries or upcoming OSGi standard)?
More background and some initial thoughts:
We're building a web-app which we envision will soon have hundreds of customers (companies) with hundreds of users each (employees), otherwise why bother ;). We want to make it modular hence OSGi. In the future customers themselves might develop and plugin components to their application so we need customer isolation. We also might want different customers to get different feature sets.
What's the "correct" way to provide different service implementations to different clients of an application when different clients share the same bundles?
We could use the app-server approach (we've looked at Virgo) and load each bundle once for each customer into their own "app". However it doesn't feel like embracing OSGi. We're not hosting a multitude of applications, 99% of the services will share the same impl. for all customers. Also we want to manage (configure, monitor etc.) the application as one.
Each service could be registered (properly configured) once for each customer along with some "customer-token" property. It's a bit messy and would have to be handled with an extender pattern or perhaps a ManagedServiceFactory? Also before registering a service for customer A one will need to acquire the A-version of each of it's dependencies.
The "current" customer will be known to each request and can be bound to the thread. It's a bit of a mess having to supply a customer-token each time you search for a service. It makes it hard to use component frameworks like blueprint. To get around the problem we could use service hooks to proxy each registered service type and let the proxy dispatch to the right instance according to current customer (thread).
Beginning our whole OSGi experience by implementing the workaround (hack?) above really feels like an indication we're on the wrong path. So what should we do? Go back to Virgo? Try something similar to what's outlined above? Something completely different?!
ps. Thanks for reading all the way down here! ;)
There are a couple of aspects to a solution:
First of all, you need to find a way to configure the different customers you have. Building a solution on top of ConfigurationAdmin makes sense here, because then you can leverage the existing OSGi standard as much as possible. The reason you might want to build something on top is that ConfigurationAdmin allows you to configure each individual service, but you might want to add a layer on top so you can more conveniently configure your whole application (the assembly of bundles) in one go. Such a configuration can then be translated into the individual configurations of the services.
Adding a property to services that have customer specific implementations makes a lot of sense. You can set them up using a ManagedServiceFactory, and the property makes it easy to lookup the service for the right customer using a filter. You can even define a fallback scenario where you either look for a customer specific service, or a generic one (because not all services will probably be customer specific). Since you need to explicitly add such filters to your dependencies, I'd recommend taking an existing dependency management solution and extending it for your specific use case so dependencies automatically add the right customer specific filters without you having to specify that by hand. I realize I might have to go into more detail here, just let me know...
The next question then is, how to keep track of the customer "context" within your application. Traditionally there are only a few options here, with a thread local context being the most used one. Binding threads to customers does tend to limit you in terms of implementation options though, as in general it probably means you have to prohibit developers from creating threads themselves, and it's hard to off-load certain tasks to pools of worker threads. It gets even worse if you ever decide to use Remote Services as that means you will completely loose the context.
So, for passing on the customer identification from one component to another, I personally prefer a solution where:
As soon as the request comes in (for example in your HTTP servlet) somehow determine the customer ID.
Explicitly pass on that ID down the chain of service dependencies.
Only use solutions like the use of thread locals within the borders of a single bundle, if for example you're using a third party library inside your bundle that needs this to keep track of the customer.
I've been thinking about this same issue (I think) for some time now, and would like your opinions on the following analogy.
Consider a series of web application where you provide access control using a single sign-on (SSO) infrastructure. The user authenticates once using the SSO-server, and - when a request comes in - the target web application asks the SSO server whether the user is (still) authenticated and determines itself if the user is authorized. The authorization information might also be provided by the SSO server as well.
Now think of your application bundles as mini-applications. Although they're not web applications, would it still not make sense to have some sort of SSO bundle using SSO techniques to do authentication and to provide authorization information? Every application bundle would have to be developed or configured to use the SSO bundle to validate the authentication (SSO token), and validate authorization by asking the SSO bundle if the user is allowed to access this application bundle.
The SSO bundle maintains some sort of session repository, and also provides user properties, e.g. information to identify the data repository (of some sort) of this user. This way you also wouldn't pass trough a (meaningful) "customer service token", but rather a cryptic SSO-token that is supplied and managed by the SSO bundle.
Please not that Virgo is an OSGi container based on Equinox, so if you don't want to use some Virgo-specific feature, you don't have to. However, you'll get lots of benefits if you do use Virgo, even for a basic OSGi application. It sounds, though, like you want web support, which comes out of the box with Virgo web server and will save you the trouble of cobbling it together yourself.
Full disclosure: I lead the Virgo project.