Tutorial: Building your first OSGi Remote Service

Introduction

The OSGi Framework provides a very simple model to expose services within a local runtime. Also available, however, is a specification of Remote Services...services that are exported by a distribution provider to allow remote access. The ECF project implements a specification-compliant distribution provider.

This tutorial will show how to

1. define and implement a simple OSGi service
2. 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();
 
}