Guice 2.0 and OSGi

Some cool news: the Guice trunk (which will eventually become 2.0) now includes my patches to support OSGi-style classloading, and also adds OSGi metadata to its jars.

This means that you will be able to take the Guice 2.0 jar and drop it onto any OSGi framework, without having to worry about classloading issues wrt. the internal proxy code. The new code also allows generated proxy classes to be unloaded when they're no longer needed.

So when Guice 2.0 hits the internet, the peaberry project will become a neat little extension library that you can drop alongside the Guice jar to inject OSGi services.

Good stuff! ( no more patches :)

Bio-reboot

You may (or may not) have noticed that I haven't been as active as usual on various projects. I've been having stomach issues for the last few months, and after numerous tests the doc decided to "reboot" my stomach by clearing out all the bacteria with antibiotics. He's now started me on probiotics to replace the good bacteria/enzymes (like the ones that help digest milk) that got zapped.

It's going to take a while before things are fully back to normal, and I need to regain about 5kg, but I'm feeling more positive (which is a good sign). The doc did tell me to keep my stress levels down, but that may be difficult when there's so many cool ideas that need implementing ;)

peaberry 0.3 available for testing / review

I've uploaded a new peaberry bundle along with early design docs:

http://peaberry.googlecode.com/files/peaberry-0.3.jar
(this also contains the source code under OSGI-OPT)

http://code.google.com/p/peaberry/wiki/DetailedDesign

the new design is much less invasive: you can decide to explicitly
add bindings to services without using the @Service annotation if
you want, and you can even use peaberry to inject services from
other registry based systems (by implementing ServiceRegistry).

There's also a small demo to show it working in practice

http://peaberry.googlecode.com/files/peaberry-0.3-logdemo.zip

although this demo doesn't actually do anything useful ;)

I'll upload the user guide tomorrow and then start working on a
production quality implementation of the OSGiServiceRegistry
(the current one is basic proof-of-concept and non-optimal).

Other TODOs:

mandatory services (ie. bundle won't start without them)

service registration (need to find an intuitive approach)

Anyway, please take a look and let me know what you think.

A jolt of Guice

Fantastic news from this year's Jolt Awards: Guice won the award for "Libraries/Frameworks" beating several other worthy finalists, including the Spring Framework! Hopefully this news will provoke a fresh injection of interest in Guice :)

Certainly I'm feeling more of a buzz about the next release, and can't wait to find time to continue my work on extending Guice to support dynamic injection of services from registries, such as the one in OSGi (http://code.google.com/p/peaberry).

So congratulations to Bob, Kevin and everyone else involved with Guice!

Pax Construct 1.0 released

I've released version 1.0 of Pax Construct, just in time for EclipseCon! (phew) And now you can find the scripts and plugin on the central Maven repository, so it's even easier to use:

http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/ops4j/pax/construct/scripts/1.0/scripts-1.0.zip

Improvement

[PAXCONSTRUCT-66]
- Add all Maven compilation dependencies to the Eclipse classpath

[PAXCONSTRUCT-67]
- Add pax:provision option to select Pax-Runner profiles (-Ddeploy=...)

[PAXCONSTRUCT-68]
- Support use of Pax-Runner argument files (-Dargs=)

[PAXCONSTRUCT-69]
- Support pax:run as alias for pax:provision

[PAXCONSTRUCT-70]
- Provide a pax-provision script that works outside of a Maven project

[PAXCONSTRUCT-71]
- Support provisioning of bundles not marked as provided dependencies

New Feature

[PAXCONSTRUCT-72]
- Add new command "pax-create-module" to simplify creation of subdirectories

Task

[PAXCONSTRUCT-59]
- Look into using velocity instead of groovy to generate the various scripts

Plus several changes to the underlying internals to improve performance and usability.

maven-bundle-plugin 1.2.0 released

It's finally here, a new stable release of the bundleplugin:

      <plugin>
        <groupid>org.apache.felix</groupid>
        <artifactid>maven-bundle-plugin</artifactid>
        <version>1.2.0</version>
      </plugin>

hopefully the next development cycle won't take so long :)

Using OSGi? Need logging?

We're very close to the first major release of Pax-Logging - if you're using OSGi and are still looking for a good logging provider, why not try the release candidate:

   pax-logging-api-1.0-RC2.jar

   pax-logging-service-1.0-RC2.jar

several major open-source projects are already using it to simplify their logging story.

An introduction to Pax tools for OSGi

I received an early Christmas present this year: my proposed tutorial for EclipseCon 2008 was accepted! Come along if you want to hear how Pax-Runner, Pax-Construct, Pax-Logging, and the rest of the Pax family can make life with OSGi much more bearable :)

Both Alin and I will be there to go through the tools, run demos, suggest OSGi best-practises, and answer questions. BTW, if you have any specific topics you'd like covered, let me know and I'll see if I can work them into the tutorial.

Hope to see you at EclipseCon 2008.