Tutorial: Building your first OSGi Remote Service

Introduction

The OSGi specification defines a very simple model to expose Services within a local runtime. With recent versions of the Enterprise Specification, a distribution provider may be used to export Services and make them available for remote access. ECF provides an implementation of this Remote Services specification.

This tutorial will show how to define a simple OSGi service and expose that service for remote access via ECF's implementation of the OSGi Remote Services standard.

Define a Service Interface

The key to building a system with low coupling and high cohesion is to define clear and coherent boundaries between different parts of your system. Central to this is defining a simple Service Interface...to allow one subsystem to interact with another subsystem, but only in clearly defined ways.

For this example, we are going to define a simple Time Service:

public interface ITimeService {
 
	public Long getCurrentTime();
 
}