| Re: [e4-dev] Doubts on the EventSystem, OSGi-Services, ... and MultiUser/Instance |
Hi,
I gave a presentation at EclipseCon about isolating applications in OSGi by using something called Composite bundles (http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/sessions/?page=sessions&id=1224). Composite bundles provide a virtual osgi framework for isolating a set of bundles which comprise an application. Composites create isolation by using a virtual framework to install a set of bundles and controlling the resources that can be shared between the different composites installed in a single OSGi framework instance. I did create a demo where I was able to run both e4 demos (contacts and photo) within their own isolated composites. This allows you to provide any isolation you want or require for your applications (including separate event busses if needed) Note that composite bundles is a specification in progress at OSGi and does not exist in the latest released OSGi Specification v4.2.
The biggest issue I found is the events for SWT. Right now most all SWT based applications assume they are the only application running on the SWT event dispatch loop. There is also a huge issue with adding SWT listeners but never ever removing them. When you start thinking about 1000s of instances of workbenches you will eventually want to stop some of them without bringing down the whole system. Unfortunately nobody removes their SWT listeners so we end up with dead listeners in SWT for applications that have stopped. The only way I could make this work (with the help of Bodgan) was to use a separate SWT display for each application and destroying that Display when a particular application stopped. This of coarse does not work on the Mac since you can only have one display event thread on Max OS X.
While composite bundles can be useful for isolating various components that comprise an application I still am not convinced this is the best approach for running multiple instances of eclipse applications (or workbenches). Even though virtual frameworks provide isolation with quite a small level of overhead you still have to install all the components (bundles) that require isolation into their own composite framework. This means if you have multiple applications that share a large amount of components, but most of the components require isolation (for example the extension registry as well as most all of the e4 stack) need to be installed in each composite where they are needed and cannot be shared. This clearly does not scale well for 1000s of instances. Even if you enable shared classes support in the VM to share the duplicate class definitions you will still run into memory issues with all the extra data.
This all comes back to the usage of singletons. We have tried to get rid of a lot of singletons, but I think there is a long ways to go. Without singletons everything needs a context to understand what it is associated with. This includes all events as well. I don't have a lightweight or easy answer for achieving that context.
Tom
Tom Schindl ---04/08/2010 10:49:39 AM---Hi,
From: | Tom Schindl <tom.schindl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> |
To: | E4 Project developer mailing list <e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx> |
Date: | 04/08/2010 10:49 AM |
Subject: | [e4-dev] Doubts on the EventSystem, OSGi-Services, ... and MultiUser/Instance |
