OSGI Apache felix- Hot deployment support

Question

A little back ground: We are using Apache Felix implementation of OSGI for our web development (Adobe CQ5 which inturn is built on apache felix). We have a few bundles of our own (around 10) and each of them are configured as a project.

Issue: During the development lifecycle, we make changes to a bundle and then use an ant script to create the bundle and deploy it in the felix. I am wondering if there is some way to enable hot deployment of the changes I make during development mode that would save developers time.

Based on my research, we can use the felix file install which will monitor a folder(s) for changes to any bundles and can deploy them automatically. But this again means I need to run ant script to build the jar file and move it to the auto deploy folder the file install is watching. Is there a better/fast way to achieve this? The script is currently taking a around 10 seconds (approx) to compile the classes, create osgi specific meta data files, bundle the classes+metadata in a new jar. Is there some way to do hot deployment, so that any change I make to a java file is automatically reflected in the bundle?

Many thanks

Answer 1

If you develop your project in Bndtools , and run from the built-in launcher, then Bndtools will handle immediately building any Java code that you change, and deploying the updated bundle into the runtime. This leads to an extremely quick code/test/debug/fix cycle.

Having said that, I'm amazed that it takes 10 seconds to compile and build your bundles currently! Are you building on an extremely ancient computer? Or is the bundle multiple gigabytes in size?

Answer 2

We tried DCEVM and it does almost everything we expected to reduce the develop+fix+test life cycle. I recommend this to all java developers using big web applications. Thanks for your suggestion on bndtools Neil.