OSGi Usage in iDempiere

[kenlongnan]

I am reading the book 'osgi and equinox', find the following content it is worth to share with you.

Broadly speaking, there are three configurations for using OSGi on a server:

Native— One or more OSGi frameworks are run on a server machine. The frameworks interact with one another using remote messaging and mechanisms such as OSGi Remote Services and the Eclipse Communications Framework (ECF), HTTP, web applications, and other conventional server-side technologies.

Solo— One or more OSGi frameworks are run and include HTTP service implementations such as Jetty. As shown in Figure 19-1, server function is exposed as servlets and JSPs and supplied by bundles hooked together by the HTTP service running directly on an OSGi framework. This is the configuration we have been using in Toast.

Bridged— In the Bridged approach, the coding and exposure model is the same as in Solo, but here the OSGi framework is embedded into a web application and run inside a traditional web application server such as Tomcat or WebSphere. This is shown in Figure 19-2.

From my understanding, iDempiere is adopting OSGi by 'Solo' style, embedded Eclipse gemini OSGi web service, am I right?

What I like to do is making iDempiere can be running inside a traditional web application (Bridged type, within Glassfish or Tomcat), it is more mature I believe, but how to make such WAR package?

Thanks & BR,

Ken

[hengsin]

Hi Ken,

Yes, it is similar to the Solo style and it is using tomcat.

A bridge mode basically means you embed the whole OSGi runtime within your web application, i.e it is just a normal war file with the only difference that your war contains the whole OSGi runtime in it ( http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/server/h ... tainer.php ).

Out of the box, iDempiere can't run in bridge mode as it is configure to run as standalone OSGi applications. It is doable but you would have to make some changes ( mostly configuration changes and probably some minor code changes too ). Unless you have a strong reason to do so, this is not recommended. If you go this way, you would be on your own as we wouldn't test our code with such configuration. Will complicate your future incorporation of any upgrade or patches from iDempiere too.

Regards,
Low

[kenlongnan]

OK, understand.

But so we will lost some enterprise feature which already support very well in traditional application server, like 'Cluster', 'Caching' or 'Load Balance'. Anybody have idea how to still keeping those features but running in an pure Eclipse OSGi container?

Thanks!

Ken

[hengsin]

Hi Ken,

Cluster and load balance is supported by the tomcat bundle that iDempiere used ( For load balance, it is also simple to run multiple instance of iDempiere and use Apache or hardware load balancer to distribute the load ).

By caching, which enterprise caching module that you means here ?

Regards,
Low

[kenlongnan]

Wow! I never know this.

So you mean the tomcat bundle in OSGi can work as same as standalone one? I think this would be a good news for the people who want to using iDempiere in production.

For 'Caching', I means Terracotta.

Thanks Low,

Ken