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ABSTRACT

Originally designed for the management of network-attached devices OSGi builds a de-facto standard to modularise all kinds of complex Java applications. It enables deployment and updating of components, which are called bundles, by supporting automatic resolution of inter-component dependencies. Despite these benefits the OSGi specification omits dedicated support for discovery, selection and loading of locally unavailable bundles. However, this is a key requirement for large distributed applications especially in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Current solutions are server-based and provide a central bundle repository thereby representing a single point of failure. Furthermore, these approaches lack support for automatic bundle selection based on non-functional properties such as resource demand or performance.

We introduce the D²CM infrastructure accounting these issues and enabling automatic discovery, selection and loading of bundles in a distributed system on basis of the peer-to-peer platform JXTA. By providing extended bundle descriptions, non-functional properties can be automatically evaluated for bundle selection and dependency resolution.

REFERENCES

• 1: Osgi Alliance, Osgi Service Platform, Release 3, IOS Press, Inc., 2003
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• 3: Li Gong, JXTA: A Network Programming Environment, IEEE Internet Computing, v.5 n.3, p.88-95, May 2001 [doi>10.1109/4236.935182]
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
OSGi, automatic code selection, dependency resolution, dynamic loading of code, non-functional properties