Part III. Deep Dives

OSGi and Equinox provide a wide array of capabilities. These building blocks make OSGi-based systems easy to construct, scale, and extend. One of the main advantages of using OSGi is the reuse of components—it allows you to focus on your domain without having to reinvent the wheel. This is evident from the fact that the Toast system developed in Part II required relatively little code.

But the tutorial only scratched the surface of what is possible. There is much more to OSGi. The standard includes specifications for many services, and most services are very comprehensive. The OSGi specification for all of this comprises hundreds of pages. Rather than attempting a broad partial coverage of the various services, the next few chapters focus on the parts of OSGi and Equinox that are essential for building sophisticated OSGi-based systems—server side, Declarative Services, and release engineering. We dive into the APIs and use them to solve problems motivated by Toast in various real-world scenarios.

You should come away from this part of the book with a solid understanding of OSGi and Equinox technology and how you can use them to accelerate and enhance the creation of flexible systems.