Wednesday, June 01, 2016

Polyglot Remote Services

ECF has a growing number of distribution providers that implement the OSGi Remote Service Admin (RSA) specification.   Recently, a provider based upon Google RPC was introduced, and now a provider based upon XML-RPC is available.   It's also now much easier to create custom distribution providers using any desired transport.   All ECF distribution providers fully and automatically implement the OSGi RSA specification.

Several of these new distribution providers also support non-OSGi and even non-Java servers and/or clients...i.e. written in JavaScript, Python, C++ and other languages.   This has a number of use cases allowing cross-language interoperability and backward compatibility.  Some examples:

It's possible to take an existing/deployed service (written in any language) and easily create an RSA client for it.   This allows RSA/OSGi to be used for discovery, deal with remote service dynamics, use of DS or Spring, and service versioning on the consumer/client.

It's possible to export an OSGi Remote Service and use any/all clients (written in any language  supported by the exporting distribution provider).

It's possible to take an existing web server implementation, and move/refactor it to OSGi RSA without breaking backward compatibility for existing clients (written in any language).

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