Remoting and OSGi

Question

Is there an elegant way to use Services across or between OSGi containers?

Is it even possible?

For instance, lets say I have a service interface on my local machine. What methodologies/technologies can I use to get that service interface accessible through a remote OSGi container's BundleContext?

Answer 1

There is a RFC called Remote Services (formerly Distributed OSGi) that does exactly what you are trying to achieve. The RFC is almost completed, and there are already 2 implementations provided respectively by Apache CXF and Eclipse ECF.

Both the implementations allows to do transparent remoting of an OSGi service. You just have to define the OSGi service as usual, and add some configuration parameters to make it a remote service.

Check:
http://cxf.apache.org/distributed-osgi.html