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Replies: 7 - Pages: 1

Reply 1. At 9:26 AM on Aug 8, 2006, Cary Clark wrote:: Re: Componentization of IBM WebSphere 6.1 with OSGi
I'm certainly no expert on OSGi or the internals of Eclipse. My question is about how tightly related the two are. Eclipse obviously supports OSGi bundles. But, my understanding is that there is plenty of other runtime code including the portions that implement the OSGi support.

In WAS 6.1, what bootstrap runtime starts up and loads the remaining parts of the app server? Is it the same bootstrap that loads and runs Eclipse? If not, how would WAS 6.1 essentially be (headless) Eclipse?

Basically I'm curious if it's two applications that support OSGi bundles but provide their own startup & runtime framework. Certainly it would make sense to reuse as much of the runtime from Eclipse (since it IS capable of much more than being an IDE), but the linked article didn't say as much. The posting says it "implies" that it's that way, but I'd sure like more official word on it.
Reply 2. At 9:35 AM on Aug 8, 2006, Alex Blewitt wrote:: Re: Componentization of IBM WebSphere 6.1 with OSGi
The link is to IBM's help page which describes the WebSphere 6.1's changes, and how it works as an OSGi runtime environment. I believe that the internals are likely to use the OSGi equinox bootup, and since the Eclipse IDE (and other Eclipse RCP and Eclipse platform applications) use Equinox interally, they probably do a similar job.

It's not necessarily the case that the WAS is actually an Eclipse application per se, although I don't see any reason why it couldn't be.

Alex.
Reply 3. At 12:46 PM on Aug 8, 2006, Chris Aniszczyk wrote:: Re: Componentization of IBM WebSphere 6.1 with OSGi
I believe WAS 6.1 actually uses the JDT to help with compliation of JSPs as I recently borked my OSGi setup in WAS 6.1 only to see issues with the JDT can't be found when accessing a JSP

Don't take my word for it though

You can also access the oh-so familiar OSGi console in WAS 6.1 at bin/osgiConsole.{bat,sh}
Reply 4. At 6:20 AM on Aug 9, 2006, Neil Bartlett wrote:: Re: Componentization of IBM WebSphere 6.1 with OSGi
Eclipse does not "support" OSGi bundles, it IS OSGi bundles. Every part of Eclipse is a bundle, and OSGi is its most fundamental architectural layer. At the same time, Eclipse extends OSGi with the concept of the Extension Registry, which most plugin developers will be familiar with.

While it's not explicit in the IBM presentation, it has been separately confirmed by Jeff McAffer that WAS 6.1 is running on the Equinox engine, which is the Eclipse implementation of the OSGi R4 runtime standard (OSGi itself is just a specification, there are multiple implementations).

Whether that means you can call WAS 6.1 an "Eclipse application" is debatable because there is no clear definition of what "Eclipse application" means. Certainly you can call WAS 6.1 an OSGi application. Perhaps it would need to use the Extension Registry - that would certainly make it an Eclipse application in my book, but there's no information available yet on whether it does use extensions.
Reply 5. At 10:13 AM on Aug 9, 2006, Alex Blewitt wrote:: Re: Componentization of IBM WebSphere 6.1 with OSGi
All true stuff, but there may be confusion over the 'applications' extension point in Eclipse and the -application command line:

http://help.eclipse.org/help32/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/extension-points/org_eclipse_core_runtime_applications.html

Thus, whilst Eclipse and WAS 6.1 are both OSGi bundles running on top of Equinox, it's also possible to have an Eclipse 'application' as one that can be invoked via the eclipse launcher with -application and supplies an IPlatformRunnable.

Mind you, it would be interesting to know if WAS 6.1 used that extension point or if it was just brought up by the standard bundle mechanism

Alex.
Reply 6. At 4:12 AM on Sep 13, 2006, Ravi wrote:: Re: Componentization of IBM WebSphere 6.1 with OSGi
"Components and Bundles"

If WAS 6.1 runs on the top of OSGi platform, and OSGi expects everything to be in the form of bundles. Does this mean EAR's RAR's etc would not be packaged as Bundles? so as to enable install/uninstall of these applications without platform re-start.

Ravi Chamarthy.
Reply 8. At 6:12 AM on Sep 13, 2006, Alex Blewitt wrote:: Re: Componentization of IBM WebSphere 6.1 with OSGi
The EAR is a standard deployment module as part of the J2EE spec; it won't change because of this. That being said, there may be (in the future) ways of migrating EAR-based applications to OSGi-type bundles, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Apart from anything else, most app servers launch the EAR in their own separate VM to allow for different memory parameters, the ability to kill some applications (or have the VM accidentally die) and so forth. I'd expect (but don't know) that WAS works as it did before with respect to deploying/launching EARs; it's just that the internals have been refactored (as, it should be noted, they have tended to over the past few versions of WAS).

Alex.