Guillaume Nodet's blog

I’ve been involved in ServiceMix, the Open Source ESB, nearly since its inception. ServiceMix was started by James Strachan and Rob Davies in May 2005 and the 1.0 version was released in August 2005. I joined LogicBlaze in October 2005 (leaving Mule behind, as I was a committer on Mule) to work on the 2.x releases (2.0 was released in November 2005) and then on the 3.x after the move from Codehaus to the Apache Software Foundation (3.0 was released in May 2007) and the 4.x versions based on OSGi (4.0 was released in March 2009). Even though I’m now focusing more on the OSGi side now (being the VP of Karaf), I’ve done my share of work on ServiceMix (I’m still the first committer in terms of number of commits according to http://svnsearch.org/svnsearch/repos/ASF/search?path=/servicemix) and I’ve been the VP of ServiceMix at the ASF for a few years. ServiceMix started as a very lightweight implementation of JBI spec. The 2.x version brought much more JBI compliance and the 3.x has se...

While thinking about a centralized logging system for Karaf and FUSE ESB , I had this idea that instead of using a built-in JMS appender, such as the one provided by Log4j, we could instead easily use Camel for that. Camel is really the best fit for such a thing, as we'd be able to add advanced things such as redelivery, batching, compression and choose easily the transport we want (JMS or plain TCP). The OSGi EventAdmin service is also an important point for monitoring events in the OSGi runtime, as most of the OSGi services do publish events to it (Blueprint bundles events, bundle events, etc...). So this was another need for a camel component. Given Camel 2.5 will be released soon, I did not want to destabilize trunk just before the release so I've committed them to a github fork for now. Those two components are really easy to use: <blueprint xmlns="http://www.osgi.org/xmlns/blueprint/v1.0.0"> <camelcontext xmlns="http://camel.apache.org/sch...

The OSGi Alliance is working on enhancements to the OSGi ConfigAdmin and some of the experimentation have been unveiled by Peter Kriens in a recent blog . The point is I was in need for enhancing the Apache Karaf blueprint configurations to be more dynamic, for example to restart the SSH server if its configuration had changed. So I decided to start hacking on this idea and create cade , the Config ADmin Extender. The project is really small and allows you to easily access OSGi configurations in a type-safe manner. It seems to work quite well, so I plan to start using it in Karaf for the various parts that need a bit of dynamism for handling configuration changes. I haven't done any release yet, but I hope to do that really soon. The source code is Apache Licensed, so feel free to have a look and provide feedback.

Over the last months, I’ve been pondering over the use of OBR, the OSGi Bundle Repository. OBR describes resources (mostly OSGi bundles) in terms of capabilities and requirements. The OBR resolver is able to find the list of bundles needed to fulfill a given bundle requirements. This allows deploying a bundle and its required dependencies without caring too much about the exact dependencies being deployed. In addition, it takes into account the already locally installed bundles and thus reduces unneeded duplication of libraries in different versions. When I started to use the Felix OBR repository earlier this year, I quickly ran into performance problems during both the parsing phase and the resolution phase. It was nearly unusable for repositories more than a few dozens of resources, which mean in real world scenarii. So I spent some time optimizing things a bit. I also enhanced the API to provide more meaningful informations and to allow more control over the resolution. That...

Yesterday, the Apache Software Foundation established Karaf as a Top Level Project. It will take some time before the infrastructure resources are correctly set up, but you should see something at http://karaf.apache.org soon.

Felix BundleRepository 1.6.0 released! I'm very happy that the Apache Felix Bundlerepository subproject has been released last week. I've been working on it recently and I think it should even have deserved a 2.0.0 release. This new version provides a new API, very similar to the org.osgi.service.bundlerepository package but which allows more control over the resolution. Performances for both parsing and resolution have been improved by a factory 10, which in my opinion finally move piece of code into a usable state. At the same time, the Felix Web Console has been released and provides a refactored page for bundle repository browsing (amongst other things). Have a look ! Next steps on this subproject will include the move to the new Felix Framework resolver to be able to support more OSGi constraints such as uses clauses and thus have results that match the OSGi resolver. I'd also love to have an up to date and correct view of maven central repository using BundleRepos...

Since Spring 2.0, Spring supports custom namespace handlers. This feature is really useful and can be used to reduce the verbosity of your spring based applications. Spring-DM has brought this feature along, so it's also available in an OSGi environment. Unfortunately, the integration of those namespace handlers leads to a lot of problems, mostly due to the legacy spring way of configuring the handlers which does not map well at all in OSGi. In a standard environment, Spring lives in a simple classloader. The classloader which is used to create the spring application is not supposed to change at any time, and everything that is needed for the application is supposed to be available from that classloader. So let's see what happens with custom namespace handlers. Spring detects custom namespace handlers through the presence of a file in the following location META-INF/spring.handlers. This file contains the name of the class supporting a given namespace. In a non OSGi en...