OSGi has a long history, with a rich portfolio of standards providing services and technical integrations. As a developer it is very easy to combine whatever standards you need to accomplish your goals. As an operator, however, assembling and maintaining an application can be much harder. The OSGi resolver will build a “complete” system from your dependency soup, but is it really what was originally built and tested? OSGi Features are a tool for developers to describe what should be deployed, and how to configure it, but offered no way to be deployed into a runtime - until now! The OSGi Feature Launcher provides a simple way to launch an OSGi framework containing the bundles and configurations of a Feature. Furthermore, the OSGi Feature Launcher Runtime service allows additional features to be dynamically added, updated and removed at runtime. The end result is a simple, repeatable experience for operators, where they can manage and maintain their systems in the certainty that what they deploy is what the developer intended. Attendees will learn about the new Feature Launcher specification, including usage examples, how to control start levels, and how to make use of merge strategies to simplify your deployment. A basic understanding of the OSGi Framework and Configuration Admin is assumed, but not essential.
1