Migration of existing software systems to OSGi is gaining momentum with wide acceptance of the OSGi technology as a standard way of managing software life-cycle through a service-oriented component-based approach. Although the technical merits of the OSGi approach are broadly recognized, the migration of existing systems may require significant efforts, such as modularizing the system code and embracing service based design. An alternative approach is adapting existing software for component based OSGi environment by putting a thin layer between the OSGi Service Platform and existing software systems. Adaptation, as opposed to migration, eliminates the necessity of modularizing or redesigning existing systems, which is particularly important when the existing software platform and associated programming model is mature and has already penetrated into the market place. As a case study of such an adaptation approach, this report demonstrates an OSGi adaptation of a popular open source Java platform built by IBM Research for integration of software analytics, processing unstructured information. The major challenge is providing analytic and application developers with all the benefits of the component based OSGi platform without entailing substantial modifications of existing framework code base and/or programming model. This report presents a comprehensive solution for integrating analytics and other resources in OSGi environment. The results of this report are applicable not only to a particular framework, but also to a wider class of Java frameworks.
By: Lev Kozakov; Mirko Jahn; Yurdaer Doganata
Published in: RC24308 in 2007
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