Tales from the OSGi trenches
In this talk we share our experience with the Apache Felix OSGi framework, used for a major rewrite of Day's family of content management products. After more than two years working with OSGi, the impact on our products, developers, customers and service people is very high, in a positive way. OSGi is no silver bullet either. The extreme modularization and dynamic service deployment features of OSGi make our products much more robust and maintainable, but the costs associated with changing people's way of thinking about code and modules, and with testing and debugging highly dynamic systems, must not be underestimated. Based on real-life code samples, we will show how OSGi is used at several levels in our products, from low-level interactions with the framework to very simple creation of (compiled or scripted) services. We will also present some of the automated testing techniques used in our project. Sharing our experience will help you decide if OSGi is for you, and more importantly at which level you should use it.
