ApacheCon NA 2010 Session

Building complex and modular RIAs with OSGi and Flex

This session will present the main design patterns for building Rich Internet Applications using both OSGi and Flex. After a brief introduction to Flex, a framework for developing rich and complex interfaces, we will see how the client-side can interact seamlessly with an OSGi backend. Then we will study the different ways of handling communication through both OSGi service calls and event-based messages. A rapid comparison between existing open source integration frameworks will be made before diving into the "AMF3 to OSGi" project, the one we have chosen. In a second part, we will see how a Flex application can be split into small modules which can be easily loaded and unloaded at runtime by leveraging the OSGi deployment layer. In concrete terms, a modular Flex application will become a set of autonomous bundles, each providing a part of the interface and its associated business logic. At the end of this presentation, a demo presenting a device manager application will be shown. The solution presented during this session will be fully based on Apache Felix components for the OSGi stack.