Everything can be a bundle — automatically repairing pre-OSGi code

Erik Wistrand (Makewave AB)

OSGi DevCon · Short Talk
Presentation
Tuesday, 10:30, 10 minutes | Room 209/210 |

Erik Wistrand

The OSGi platform expects bundles to play nicely, e.g. only use the bundle class loader, use global resources as system properties wisely, and never-ever call System.exit(). However, a large number of useful libraries are not aware of these restrictions and are thus problematic to use without source code modifications and recompilation. This talk will explore means of automatically, at run-time, solve these problems using byte-code manipulation and automatic creation of bundle manifests.

The target audience of this talk are both experienced implementors who are interested in the inner workings of the OSGi framework and beginner OSGi programmers who are interested in why third-party libs "don't find their classes". A short demo based on the Knopflerfish OSGi framework will be provided and limitations of the methods will be mentioned.

Erik Wistrand has been working with the OSGi specification and reference implementation since 1999 at former Gatespace AB, currently Makewave AB. He was the lead in the process of creating the open source Knopflerfish OSGi framework in 2004. As a human-computer interaction specialist he was a co-founder of the data visualization company Spotfire Inc. He's now working with Makewave AB to expand the applications areas of the Knopflerfish OSGi framework.