EIG:Remote Services Admin

Since ECF 3.3/Helios release in June 2010, ECF has provided a full implementation of the OSGi Remote Services specification. This specification is in the OSGi 4.2 compendium, chapter 13. You can download the compendium specification here.

As of our 3.5 release (March 2011), we now also support the Remote Services Admin specification. This is chapter 122 from the OSGi enterprise specification, and you can download this specification here.

What's Remote Services Admin?

Remote Services Admin (RSA) is the specification of a management agent for remote services. The Remote Services spec (chapter 13), defines the programmer-specified service properties for exporting an OSGi service as a remote service, but does not say anything about the mechanism or implementation of the two major subsystems involved: discovery (for knowing that a remote service is available on some network), and distribution (for accessing and using that remote service). For those that need to control and/or customize the actual discovery and distribution of an OSGi service over a network, the management agent specified by RSA allows them to have a much greater degree of control...i.e. to allow them to more easily secure remote services, to optionally use multiple/alternative communications protocols for both discovery and distribution, to customize and extend the behavior of both discovery and distribution as needed for more complex/enterprise use cases. The RSA specification defines the API for this remote services management agent, and ECF 3.5 provides a complete/spec-compliant, small, easily customizable and extensible, cross-framework implementation.