[DISCUSS] OSGi friendliness ... or more

[gnodet]

I'd like to be able to deploy Activiti in OSGi, so I'm gonna work on that in the near future and contribute it if there is an interest in that (hopefully there is).

I haven't seen any work on that yet, so I guess I'll start from scratch.  The question is first:
  * are developers familiar with OSGi at all ?
  * what kind of integration in OSGi do we want ?

The first one is mostly to know who i'm talking to 😉  I've been working with OSGi since a few years, but I suppose everybody is not in my case.  Anyway, the important is the second question obviously.  There are two different possible ways, one being a limited OSGi integration (mostly providing the needed OSGi bundles to get all the dependencies and a big bundle for Activiti itself), the other one is to leverage OSGi more in order to use it's dynamism and pluggability through the OSGi registry.  I don't have a good grasp of Activiti's architecture yet, so I can't dive into details at this point).

This email is mostly to gauge interest in OSGi …

[gnodet]

I'm thinking what would be nice in OSGi would be to have a bundle which would start the activiti ProcessEngine (maybe through a managed service factory, not sure if it makes sense yet) and expose it as an OSGi service, if it's sufficiently configurable, it could be the default bundle distribution in osgi.
For deployment, I'm thinking about having a bundle extender which looks for deployed bundles containing files in a known location, for example in OSGI-INF/activiti/*.bpmn20.xml (this should be configurable using an OSGi manifest header as it's usually the case).  This could be the default and we could add a url handler to transform a plain bar file into an osgi bundle as above.
I'll start experimenting with that …

[falko_menge]

There is definitely interest in making Activiti OSGi-friendly. There is even a JIRA issue for it: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-111

Currently, we don't have the resources to work on that and would really appreciate any help.

[jbarrez]

As Falko says, there is indeed interest to make Activiti OSGI friendly. I know that Tom brought it up several time.
Tom is currently on holdiday (back on Monday), so I'll send him your direction when he is back.

However, there is little OSGO knowledge in the core team, so contributions here are more then welcome!

[gnodet]

Great, glad to see there's an interest here.    I can't assign the issues to myself atm, but I'm definitely planning to work on that the whole OSGi thing.
I've already managed to deploy activiti-pvm and activiti-engine as part of ACT-222, so I'll continue my investigations there.

I think ProcessEngine(s) should be registered as OSGi services, which mean the ProcessEngines class would have to be refactored a bit to allow a pluggable discovery mechanism.

[jvazquez]

I´m really glad to hear that Guillaume is interested in the Activiti/OSGi stuff. My team and I have worked with ServiceMix and Karaf for a long time and now we are very interested in Activiti too.

Please, let us know if you would appreciate some help in certain areas. Anyway, we´ll stay tuned for more news about your design and core implementation.

Regards.