A-OSGi: A Framework to Support the Construction of Autonomic OSGi-Based Applications

The OSGi specification is becoming widely adopted to build complex applications. It offers adequate support to build modular applications, where modules can be added and removed at runtime without stopping the entire application. This paper proposes A-OSGi, a framework that leverages on the native features of the OSGi platform to support the construction of autonomic OSGi-based applications. A-OSGi offers a number of complementary mechanisms for that purpose, such as: the ability to extract indicators for the performance of deployed bundles; mechanisms that allow to have a fine grain control of how services bind to each other and to gather this information in runtime; and support for a policy language that allows the administrator to define autonomic behavior of the OSGi application.