CompletableFuture for OSGi Remote Services

As some of you may know, ECF's implementation of OSGi Remote Services has support for asynchronous proxies.   This allows consumers of remote services to easily use asynchronous/non-blocking invocation to access a remote service.  For example...here's a simple service interface that's used in our remote service tutorial:

public interface ITimeService {
    public Long getCurrentTime();
}

As with any OSGi Remote Service, any consumer that discovers this service will potentially block when they call getCurrentTime(). This is just the nature of call/return semantics applied to remoting...and so will be true for any implementation of OSGi remote services.

ECF's impl of OSGi Remote Service offers asynchronous proxies, meaning that iff a related service interface is defined...e.g.

public interface ITimeServiceAsync {
    public Future getCurrentTimeAsync();
}

then consumers will be able to use ITimeServiceAsync to access the service...e.g:

ITimeServiceAsync tsa = ... get ITimeServiceAsync reference

Future timeFuture = tsa.getCurrentTimeAsync();
...do work...
Long time = timeFuture.get();

With ECF 3.8.0 we further added [3]...i.e. the ability to have ITimeServiceAsync be registered as a service automatically on the consumer...so that (e.g.) the ITimeServiceAsync reference can be injected via declarative services...e.g.

...ds component impl...

void bindTimeServiceAsync(ITimeServiceAsync tsa) {
     ...use or store tsa...
}

This [3] is all available in ECF 3.8.0.   Note that the service interfaces have absolutely no reference to ECF classes, nor to OSGi classes.   None are needed now.

As many of you certainly know...java8 just came out, and a big part of java8 is improved support for concurrency, functional programming, and lambdas.    This support for concurrency in java8 is potentially very useful for users of OSGi Remote Services.

Consider CompletableFuture, which as the name implies is a type of java.util.concurrent.Future.    It has some very nice properties for API/service designers...the main one being that it's not at all necessary to call Future.get directly...but rather you can write nice, succinct and *guaranteed to be non-blocking but asynchronous* usage such as:

CompletableFuture cf = ...get CompletableFuture....

cf.thenAccept((time) -> System.out.println("time is: " + time));

This is nice...it's completely non-blocking...and very succinct.  Also you can do very interesting things with asynchronous/event-driven chaining/filtering, etc., etc. All guaranteed to be non-blocking...which is a key guarantee for remoting.

Yesterday I realized that with Java8, our asynchronous proxies could be easily generalized to allow this:

public interface ITimeServiceAsync {
    public CompletableFuture getCurrentTimeAsync();
}

I made some minor additions to the ECF remote service implementation of asynchronous proxies and now this is working. What I mean by this is that consumers of an arbitrary remote service can now do this

...service component impl...

void bindTimeServiceAsync(ITimeServiceAsync tsa) {
       // Get the CompletableFuture...no blocking here
       CompletableFuture cf = tsa.getCurrentTimeAsync();
       // print out time when done...no blocking anywhere!
       cf.thenAccept((time) -> System.out.println("Remote time is: " + time));
}

Note a few things:

1. There is no blocking anywhere.  This is true even though the actual time value is retrieved via a remote OSGi service
2. The remote service host doesn't have to provide any implementation of ITimeServiceAsync.  It's constructed by ECF's RS impl automatically
3. It's very easy to handle failure (e.g. network/io failure) via CompletableFuture.handle.  This is obviously a big deal for remote services...which are much more inclined to fail because of the network.
4. No reference to either OSGi classes or ECF classes anywhere in host or consumer code

This is nice for remote service consumers, because it gives them strong no blocking guarantees, and can be very efficiently implemented (no additional threads) by remote service providers using asynchronous messaging (e.g. JMS, etc).   It also allows them to use all of CompletableFuture's APIs (see CompletableFuture javadoc).

This will obviously be part of ECF Luna...and I've created some test code (like above) that I intend to use to create another tutorial over the next month. Watch the ECF wiki for that tutorial.

The only drawback is that this does, of course, depend upon Java8...and so requires that both the remote service host and consumer use Java8, and that the distribution provider be enhanced slightly to use CompletableFuture.   Fortunately it's not technically challenging to make these enhancements, and we will make support classes available for those that wish to Java8 enhance existing or their own RS provider.

[1] https://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF/Asynchronous_Remote_Services
[2] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Tutorial:_Building_your_first_OSGi_Remote_Service
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=420785