OSGi Remote Services are discovered by ECF's Remote Services implementation in two ways:
1. Via a network discovery protocol provider such as: Zeroconf, jSLP, etcd, Zookeeper, or some custom protocol
2. Via an xml format known as an Endpoint Description Extender Format (EDEF)
The EDEF format is specified by the OSGi Remote Service Admin specification.
When importing an EDEF-defined remote service, it's typically necessary to construct the entire EDEF file 'by hand' rather than having he EDEF generated automatically. This can be quite complicated to construct by hand as some properties are required, others are optional and it's not obvious what all of the values must be for successful import.
A new capability has been added to ECF's Remote Service Admin implementation that allows EDEF Properties to be used with the EDEF, thus simplifying the creation of remote service consumers that use EDEF for import.
This capability was added to support the usage of JaxRS Remote Services in an Eclipse RCP client. See a description of this use case here.
