HowTo Build an OSGI Enterprise Server: EasybeansServiceTracker

We've seen that its not easy to use EasyBeans OSGI - you have to be very carefully how to start bundles, watch many dependencies etc. So we created a „Server - Agent“ - bundle to control and manage these tasks.

This „Server - Agent“ - bundle contains an EasybeansServiceTracker we'll discuss now. 

At first we must be sure that all EasyBeans Components are started - there's an easybeans.agent bundle controlling this. EasyBeans Components are:

Which of these EasyBeans Components you need depends from your reqirements - in this blog series we'll only look at the EJB3 Container.

One component is important in our use case: JDBCPool registers data sources as JNDI names and this must be done before EasyBeans can manage the "EJB - bundles".

If we're sure that all EZB Components are registered and also the JDBCPool Component has registered all data sources, then we can start our  „PersistenceContext - Bundles“ and „EJB - Bundles“. 

While creating an EJB3 - Container for each of our „PersistenceContext - Bundles“ and each of our „EJB - Bundles“ EasyBeans registers for each Business - Interface (@Local, @Remote) a ManagedService. The EasybeansServiceTracker tracks all Remote - Business - Interfaces and registers them as Riena Remote Endpoints.

When the EJB3 Container is completed from EasyBeans - an EZBContainerService will be registered. After checking that EZBContainerServices are registered for all of our EJB - Bundles we can register the RienaEasyBeansServerService: our Server it ready.

EasybeansServiceTracker

You'll have some logic like this in your Tracker:

Is the use of a ServiceTracker the best solution ?

At first it looks good to have all the logic around the EasyBeans EJB3Container at a central point in our EasybeansServiceTracker - and it works well.

Analyzing it in more detail you'll find out that its very complex and difficult to manage - even thinking on multi-threading. Also: does it look like the nature of a dynamic and flexible OSGI solution ? How to react if bundles or services are stopped and started again ?

But there's an alternative way: we'll look again how to solve the EJB3 - Container in our OSGI Enterprise Application using Declarative Services. Then you can decide what you prefer to use: ServiceTracker or Declarative Services.

There's an this index of this blog series in the column right beside the blog entries.

blog in german.