Product Description

Spring and OSGi’s features are a natural fit; they are orthogonal to each other: OSGi is about packaging, deployment, and versioning issues, while Spring is about providing the necessary foundation to wire up Java classes in their most basic form using dependency injection and aspect orientation to fulfill an application’s purpose.

Pro Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi™ Service Platforms by Daniel Rubio is the first book to cover OSGi as practically implemented by the world’s most popular, agile, and open source enterprise Java framework, Spring.

• Author Daniel Rubio covers the ease at which OSGi is used with the Spring Framework in development, packaging, versioning, and deployment.
• Enterprises are trusting Spring more and more, and this book leverages OSGi in a way that can “complete” the use of Spring in the enterprise, as OSGi is already being trusted and adopted by IBM, BEA, and others.
• The text discusses how Spring OSGi makes your Spring applications trusted SOA applications.

What you’ll learn

• Understand the fundamentals of OSGi and Spring, and combine the two.
• Take your Spring applications and bundles, and incorporate OSGi for production–ready packaging, versioning practices, and deployment.
• Create production–ready Spring Beans by packaging and versioning, and then deploy them.
• Develop data access methods and means for your Spring OSGi projects.
• Build and use GUIs for Spring OSGi.
• Test, scale, and optimize your Spring OSGi applications for deployment and performance.

Who is this book for?

This book is for Java developers using the Spring Framework who are looking to take advantage of OSGi features, and Java developers in general looking to explore OSGi’s role on server–side development.

About the Apress Pro Series

The Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder.

You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard–won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #363405 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781430216124
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author

Daniel Rubio is an independent consultant with over 10 years of experience in enterprise and web–based software. More recently, Daniel is founder and technical lead at MashupSoft.com.

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Customer Reviews

OSGi Bible
This book came in at just the right time. My company is about to begin utilizing the OSGi model of deployments and I needed something substantial that would give me a good understanding of OSGi.
And I have to say this book delivers.

The first part of the book goes through the OSGi API style of deployments without utilizing Spring. That actually starts making the whole concept of services and references to services more clearer.

In the next chapters the author goes on to show how Spring DM can be utilized to do the deployments. This makes it much easier to do the deployments.

Then there is a whole chapter devoted to versioning. I didn't even know that you could version specific packages.

Gathering from the title, I thought there would be a big push for the Spring DM Server. That wasn't the case. The author only talked about the Spring DM server in one of the chapters and on the specifics of the Spring DM Server packaging systems in another.

The testing chapter in the end is killer though. I wouldn't even know where to look to figure out how to do the testing of OSGi bundles, especially the integration tests.
Using the Spring DM Testing API, it makes it quite easy (at least from the two examples that were presented).

Overall the style of the book is very easy to read and this book provides so much information that I consider it the OSGi Bible.

If you are going to be using OSGi, I highly recommend this book!

The first, the best
This book is the first and most comprehensive guide to two Spring OSGi(tm) products: Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi(tm) Service Platforms and SpringSource(tm) Server released till now. It can be thought of as a full featured, professional, step by step tutorial to OSGi(tm) world from Spring's perspective. Each topic is filled with examples and code listings that you are encouraged to go through to better understand the concepts being presented. The complete source code bundle can be downloaded from the publisher's website and contains everything you need to run applications: not only java code, ant scripts, ivy dependencies, server configuration snippets but also OSGi(tm) containers and all required libraries!. I can assure you that having them all put together in one place will save you a lot of time when you decide to play with the samples.



The book consists of 9 chapters, each focused on a different aspect of Spring and OSGi(tm). It starts with an introduction to OSGi(tm) and Spring Framework to help you understand the fundamentals of each technology and how to combine their distinctive features sensibly to create robust, manageable, enterprise-level solutions. In the following chapters you can find details on Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi(tm) Service Platforms and learn how to simplify the process of creating Spring applications for OSGi(tm) environment and SpringSource(tm) Server which is a full featured Application Server designed to run both enterprise Java and Spring OSGi(tm) applications. Finally, the author explains the design principles of the web and data access layers in a springified OSGi(tm) environment, the OSGi(tm) versioning, and there is also a chapter about integration testing techniques.



Pro Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi(tm) Service Platforms is indubitably a definitive guide to Spring OSGi(tm) products . It presents Spring development in OSGI(tm) environment in a very practical and well organized manner. The style of the book is very easy to read and it provides so much information that I can highly recommend this book to everyone interested in developing Spring applications on OSGi(tm) platform.

Unfocused and full of problems
In my opinion this is one of the poorer development books I've read in a while (I probably go through 7-8 per year). I wanted to like it, and I wanted to keep giving it a chance, but it continued to let me down. Perhaps it just isn't suited to my reading style; I prefer reading books apart from a computer unless I know that it's an iterative hands on tutorial (a la Agile Web Development with Rails). I've learned languages, frameworks, and algorithms this way. One major consequence in not running the examples with a machine in front of me is that I have to keep everything in my head, which usually isn't a problem. A second consequence is that I will do mental checks whenever something is added or changed to the code or configuration - a sort of 'yea, that makes sense, so does that; okay why did they do that? ah, now I see, that makes sense then' train of thought.

This was my first major problem with this book - the mental checks continuously failed.

I really feel sorry for anyone who hasn't used Spring before and picks up this book. Chapter 2 (Introducing Spring) does a horrible job of it, and I fear that anyone reading through it without thorough knowledge of the platform will swear it off for good as being incredibly complicated. The 'Hello World' example is so full of extraneous junk that I have to guess that the author had a page quota to reach. Extras bolted on that aren't necessary for a introduction include: JPA usage, testing JPA, SpringMVC, AJAX, and finally what blew it for me; Tiles. The whole time I was asking myself 'why are all these pages being dedicated to topic X' when that topic didn't have anything to do with OSGI or Spring DM. I finally lost it when he started using Tiles. Why the f*** would you use Tiles for a Hello World example?! It along with the other aspects mentioned above only serve to complicate the example for no good reason. A much better approach would have been to start with something small and simple - straight Servlets and JSPs and build upon it in later chapters when relevant concepts pop up. Further examples don't build off of this Frankenstein Hello World which is good and bad. Good because it's a terrible starting point (fortunately the other examples in the book drop the use of Tiles - which begs the question - Why was it ever brought up?), bad because you have to learn something different from the ground up.

A second irritating example of this is the Chapter 7 example which introduces a JDBC version of the JPA application from Chapter 5. Why is this done? We're not learning anything interesting here that requires a full example. Anyone with knowledge of Spring knows that you can easily substitute different DAO implementations. What is especially frustrating is that in Chapter 5 (which uses JPA and SpringSource dm Server) the author discusses the complications of running JPA in an OSGI environment, and special things that are built into the SpringSource server to make this easier for you. What I really want to learn in Chapter 7 is how to run JPA without the SpringSource server and its prebuilt magic; instead I get a sidebar saying it can be done with minimal instructions to do so. What I would have preferred in this chapter is an example of what is hard (getting JPA running w/o Spring's server), and a sidebar about what is easy (using a JDBC DAO instead of a JPA implementation).

My second major problem was that I didn't feel that it did a good job of discussing OSGI implementation strategies and covering other issues that would come up in a project with more than a few toy services. In the example provided in Chapter 5 a simple application is broken up into six OSGI bundles. This seems excessive for a small example, but how does it grow when the number of service/model/web components grows? I also don't remember getting a good overview of (in my mind) one of the more interesting aspects of OSGI and Spring DM - being able to deploy new versions of bundles without restarting your server.

There were other areas of the book that felt like filler and really didn't seem to add much to the topic of OSGI. Examples include integration with Apache Ivy, using SSL with Tomcat, and Flex integration. All of these to me seem like loosely related topics that could have been mentioned in much less detail. I would have preferred more discussion of core OSGI topics mentioned in the above paragraph.

Finally the book in general seemed rushed and lacking focus. There are problems with code examples. There are formatting problems (some listings are inexplicably double spaced for example). There is a lot of 'junk' woven in to things that is just unnecessary (XML namespaces that are not needed, multi-page listings of OSGI manifest files, the use of Tiles - it really bugs me, can you tell? :). The whole thing is written like a long blog entry instead of a good book; it's a step by step tutorial that works if you download the code from the book's site, but not if you type it in or try to make sense of it in your head due to some errors. I'm guessing that it was trying to be the first to market on this topic. It succeeded at that, but failed as good coverage of the material. Don't get me wrong - you'll learn about OSGI, Spring DM, and the SpringSource dm Server, but it'll take more effort than it should to make sense of it all.

Personally I'm waiting for the Manning books on the subject. They've split things out across different books which will hopefully give each subject the space that it needs to be covered properly.