Introduction to OSGI/Equinox - Workshop at Eclipse India Summit
- Sameera Jayasoma
- Senior Director, Platform Architecture - WSO2
Eclipse Equinox is a plug-in system that allows developers to implement an application in a set of 'bundles' using common services and infrastructure. And the OSGi technology provides a service-oriented plug-in-based platform for application development. Since OSGi is a dynamic environment where bundles can be installed, started, stopped and uninstalled at runtime, Equinox-based servers use the OSGi runtime that provides a service abstraction and OSGi services map well to services in a SOA.
Equinox is considered to be a major contributor to the success of Eclipse on the client-side (RCP). But it is not limited to the client-side. It can be applied in a general way to build any kind of application, especially servers. For instance, you can extend the server with additional facility by installing extra bundles, like a log analyzer for your HTTP service. Both Equinox and OSGi are seeing a surge in interest from a wide range of communities from embedded - the traditional domain of OSGi, to desktop tools and applications to mobile devices and servers.
Sameera Jayasoma, a Software Engineer at WSO2, conducted a work shop in the recently concluded Eclipse India Summit 2009 covering OSGi modularization, declarative services, OSGi standard services, security, extensibility, classloading, JEE Integration (Tomcat, Spring), tooling and more.