Modular Java: a review
Don’t forget to visit OSGi books for more news on available and upcoming books on OSGi
Modular Java: Creating Flexible Applications with OSGi and Spring is one of the first OSGi books hitting the shelves this year, and probably the most practical and simple book on server-side OSGi published so far.
The author (Craig Walls) adopts a really pragmatic approach here: the OSGi specification is covered only in its fundamental aspects, and most part of the book is spent discussing tools and methods to simplify OSGi application development. That considered, the book target is probably not the OSGi absolute beginner, who will benefit more from reading a book like OSGi in Practice (or the specification itself), but the OSGi practitioner who wants to start developing its OSGi application the right way. |
|
Let’s now examine the book in more details.
Coverage of the OSGi specification
The book just covers the basics of the Core specification (bundles, modularity, services, fragments) and only a few of the Compendium services (Configuration Admin Service, just a few words on the HTTP Service and the upcoming Blueprint service). Therefore, a basic OSGi knowledge is required to fully understand the contents of the book.
Coverage of OSGi tools
The real value added of this book is the description of a complete “OSGi development method” that covers the development, packaging, configuration and management of an application. This method takes advantage of several tools, that are clearly described in the book
- Pax Construct
- Pax Runner
- Pax Exam
- Pax ConfMan
- Maven
- Apache Felix Web Console
Another big topic in this book is Spring Dynamic Modules, which is explained in good detail in Chapter 6 and 7.
Example Application
The example application is a quite interesting Jar search engine built on top of Spring, Spring DM and Compass. Not all the code is explained in the book, but everything can be downloaded from the book website.
Conclusion
As remarked before, that’s not a book for OSGi beginners. The reader must be already familiar with OSGi development and the OSGi specification.
On the other side, the OSGi practitioners will find particularly interesting the hard work that Craig has put in trying to simplify OSGi development, and his adoption of Pax tools to make the process as smooth as possible.
The book is also a good starting point for those interested in learning Spring DM.
Highly recommended.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
