OSGi 4.2 remote services support was the major theme for ECF 3.3 and 3.4.
For ECF 3.5 (late Feb 2011), we will release a full implementation of the OSGi Remote Service Admin (RSA) specification from the enterprise experts group. The RSA spec (chap 122) extends the remote service spec, and provides standard ways to monitor, control, secure, and extend the use of OSGi remote services.
ECF's impl of this spec is now complete, and we are engaged in testing (with the OSGI TCK), integrating with examples, adding new examples, and adding documentation.
One exciting thing about this implementation is that with ECF's open provider architecture, it's possible for other discovery and/or distribution systems to be easily introduced by anyone (us or others)...and all providers will automatically be standard compliant. This vastly simplifies the job of taking an existing protocols and transports (for example a REST-based protocol) and exposing them as OSGi remote services.
Further, ECF's impl already supports asynchronous remote services, and this support is exposed in a standards-compliant way.
