New OSGi Work - Features

As recently the OSGi R7 Core, Enterprise and Compendium specs were completed, work has started on the next specifications for OSGi R8. Over the coming few months we'll focus on some of the new work that is underway at OSGi, here on this blog. In this post, we'll look at OSGi Features.

OSGi Frameworks are being used in many different scenarios, from embedded devices and set-top boxes to UI desktop applications and enterprise back-end server applications.  As your OSGi-based application grows, so does the number of bundles that define the application. In many cases, OSGi applications can grow to hundreds of bundles or even more. When an application reaches such a number of bundles, it can become hard to fully understand the role of each and every bundle in the application.

For this reason, many open-source communities and commercial products have started to develop solutions to group features together into more chunky, reusable components. The existing solutions generally combine both a design mechanism for these larger components plus an accompanying runtime. For example, there are Apache Karaf Features, Eclipse Features, Apache Sling Features, OSGi Subsystems, and others.

OSGi Features focus on architecting groups of bundles, configuration, and metadata, defining a mechanism to describe these groups. The Features can at runtime be mapped to existing implementations that support such functionality and in this way provide portability across these.

For example, you might create a Feature that defines a web service to record and provide gaming high scores. Your Feature might use other existing Features that provides HTTP, Jax-RS and database access. As Feature definitions can be published into a repository, such as a Maven Repository, you can use other Features simply by referring to them using repository coordinates. Once your Feature is ready to be used, you can publish yours in a repository, so that others can use it as well.

OSGi Features are extensible so that you can store your own metadata, along with the declaration of your binaries and configuration. This keeps things that belong together, defined together. For example, let's say your application needs a specific database schema to run. You can then declare this inside your Feature, rather than in a side file which might get out of sync.  And, Features are a neat way to scope your entire application: if you want to create a Docker image with a slimmed down version of the Java runtime, your Feature definition is a great way to know what you need from Modular Java and what parts you don't need, and could even be used to generate a minimal runtime image.  As OSGi Features are defined using JSON, so they can be handled by tools and other runtimes, which can be useful when validating them or for processing custom extensions.

To summarize, OSGi Features are aimed at architecting reusable components for OSGi that are larger than bundles. OSGi Features are a design artifact, they don't mandate a specific runtime for it. Therefore OSGi Features can be mapped to existing technologies that already exist in this space, or be used as-is by tools and runtimes that natively handle them.

To learn more about OSGi Features. they are being discussed in RFP 188 and RFC RFC 241. Both can be found at the OSGi design github repo: https://github.com/osgi/design