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Re: [equinox-dev] When is DS done loading services? 
Danail Nachev wrote:

I'm not sure what is the application being discussed here, but here is a
use case:

An RCP application is being built, which is headless and when launched
does some processing and then exits (Update manager refreshes the
installation?). This application supports plugins. So, when the
application is launched it should get reference to all plugins and use
them do its thing. I don't think it is possible to deal with the
dynamics of OSGi registry in this case - the application needs to know
the available plugins upfront (or it can use the extension registry).


Did you say why you cannot install your plugins in a lower start level?


Such usage of OSGi may not be very natural (an application which doesn't
change while running), but OSGi provides other advantages beside the
dynamic environment.

Another thing is how bundles are developed usually: if a bundle provides
services w/o dependencies, they are registered in the Activator's start
method. If a bundle provides services with dependencies upon another
services, the bundle opens a tracker and register the service when all
its dependencies are satisfied. Because the tracker is opened in the
start() method, the service is registered immediately (in the same
start() method call). The current DS operation is similar to: when the
bundle is started, it spawns a thread which registers what it is needed.
This doesn't feel natural.
I think these are the issue you always have when you have a bunch of things that need to be started and there are dependencies among them. If your assumption is that none of your plugins depend on each other, then I understand why it appears like this is easy situation to resolve for your core component since it just needs to be injected with all plugins. However, if there are dependencies among plugins, even if there is no dynamism, then you still have to wait for everything to come up to handle the ordering of dependencies before you can continue. 


Another effect of the synchronous processing: it will clear up the
meaning of framework started event: With DS handling services
asynchronously, framework started has no meaning, because the framework
isn't ready when the event is delivered (same with start level changes)
- DS is still registering services.


Well, the framework is ready. The services aren't.


OSGi supports dynamic changes, but I think it should be left to the
clients to decide whether they need it. Using a subset of the OSGi
features is perfectly OK, IMHO.


Agreed.

-> richard


--
Danail Nachev
Senior Software Engineer/Development Tools
ProSyst Labs EOOD
-------------------------------------------------
stay in touch with your product.
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Cortez, Otto wrote:

Is that true of all extension of the
org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications extension point, that they don’t
start until the platform has been initialized?  Even when they run in
any thread and not just the main?


I would be happy enough to be able to say: if you declare your services
in this way, we will wait for those to be initialized before we start,
otherwise we won’t guarantee your service will be available.  I was
hopping to be able to do that through DS, so waiting for the DS thread
to stop seems fine, although it would be nice to have a more formal way
to do this, through public API.


In our application, we don’t expect bundles to be started and stopped
dynamically (at least not too often), so we are really only worried
about knowing what services there are at the initial startup.


I was trying to figure out a good way to safeguard against the dynamism
of the services.  I don’t think there is an issue with the services
which require 0..1 or 1..1 instances of another service, but I don’t
know what to do about the services which require 0..n and 1..n because
you don’t really know how many more services there might be without
doing what DS seems to already do, look through the manifests and find
the declared services.  I suppose you could also wait for the platform
to stop starting bundles, but then DS could still be running so I’d
still need a way to know when it was done.


Thanks,
Otto


------------------------------------------------------------------------

*From:* equinox-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:equinox-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Thomas Watson
*Sent:* Wednesday, September 03, 2008 1:30 PM
*To:* Equinox development mailing list
*Subject:* RE: [equinox-dev] When is DS done loading services?


I think part of the problem here is the term "application". In this case
we are talking about an RCP application which is defined as an Eclipse
extension to the org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications extension point.
When launching Eclipse the default application is started after the
platform has been initialized and the start-level has reached the final
state.

RCP applications have historically depended on the platform to be "fully
booted" and ready before their application is started. This mentality
does not mix well with the dynamic nature of OSGi services. When DS is
added to the mix the boot sequence become less predictable because
services are not registered synchronously as bundles get started during
the bootup process (incrementing the start-level). Currently the Eclipse
application container just assumes the application is ready to launch
after the the platform has been initialized and the final start-level
has been reached.

To work around the issue you will need to do something like BJ says and
make the application handle dynamic service registrations. The problem
you will run into is that the Eclipse application container has no idea
that your Eclipse application depends on services before it is ready to
launch. So in addition to making your application handle dynamic
services, you will also need to handle waiting for your "required"
services to be available in your application start method before
allowing your application start method to continue to bring up your
application. Or you can simply allow your application to start and put
safeguards in to handle when a service is not available yet.

It would be great if we could figure out a better way to mix the use of
extensions and services together in an Eclipse application.

Tom



Inactive hide details for BJ Hargrave---09/03/2008 02:04:43 PM---But
even DS only knows about started bundles. If a bundle is sBJ
Hargrave---09/03/2008 02:04:43 PM---But even DS only knows about started
bundles. If a bundle is started after DS has processed some bundle, then
new services can


From:

	


BJ Hargrave/Austin/IBM@IBMUS


To:

	


Equinox development mailing list <equinox-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>


Date:

	


09/03/2008 02:04 PM


Subject:

	


RE: [equinox-dev] When is DS done loading services?

------------------------------------------------------------------------





But even DS only knows about started bundles. If a bundle is started
after DS has processed some bundle, then new services can be registered.
There is no way for DS to know about all possible services being ready
since some may come from bundles yet to be started. The best DS could
tell you is that it is done processing services from bundles that are
currently started.

It is far better in the long run for the application to handle dynamism.
Anything you do today to try and enforce some ordering will likely fail
in the future when some thing changes about the set of installed bundles.

--

*BJ Hargrave*
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM
OSGi Fellow and CTO of the OSGi Alliance <http://www.osgi.org/>_
_hargrave@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:hargrave@xxxxxxxxxx>

	


office: +1 386 848 1781
mobile: +1 386 848 3788




From:

	

"Cortez, Otto" <OttoCortez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

To:

	

"Equinox development mailing list" <equinox-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Date:

	

2008/09/03 02:48 PM

Subject:

	

RE: [equinox-dev] When is DS done loading services?


------------------------------------------------------------------------




It is more important for us to know what functionality is installed and
available before parts of the application execute then it is for us to
support dynamism. I would like to keep the dynamism if we can, but to do
that and provide reliable execution I think the application would need
to guarantee that all services known through the bundle manifests will
be initialized before we start processing. I guess using extensions
might be a better fit.

I’m not sure if we need DS to synchronously register services as much as
some way to listen to DS events or know its state, like is it just
sitting around waiting for more bundles to be activated or deactivated.
I was focused on services being managed by DS since I thought DS would
know weather it was done initializing all services listed in the active
bundles’ manifest files and then we would be able to say to users which
may supply functionality, well if you use DS then we could guarantee
that we wouldn’t start until DS had initialized your services.

Thanks,
Otto


------------------------------------------------------------------------

*
From:* equinox-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:equinox-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *BJ Hargrave*
Sent:* Wednesday, September 03, 2008 7:22 AM*
To:* Equinox development mailing list*
Subject:* Re: [equinox-dev] When is DS done loading services?


The whole point of services is that the are dynamic. The fact the DS is
"processing" them on behalf of some bundle does not mean that another
bundle should know or observe that.

Bundles which depend upon a service need to deal with that service's
dynamism. You can't assume a bundle's activator or starting a bundle
will synchronously register some services. I would not support an option
for DS to synchronously register services during bundle start as this
means people will improperly use that.

You may also be seeing an impedance mismatch between the lifecycle of
extensions and services. Extensions become active when the bundle is
resolved while services become active only when the bundle is started.
Switching to use extensions will not allow for dynamism (unless you want
to write all the code to use the extension registry API to do so.)

You may be able to use startlevels to mitigate the issue (make sure all
bundles providing service B are started before bundles using B), but
this is also a hack. It would be better if service A dealt with the
dynamics of service B such that service A has a dynamic dependency on
service B and is able to accept B's being registered and unregistered at
any time.
--

*BJ Hargrave*
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM
OSGi Fellow and CTO of the OSGi Alliance <http://www.osgi.org/>_
_hargrave@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:hargrave@xxxxxxxxxx>

	


office: +1 386 848 1781
mobile: +1 386 848 3788


From:

	

Stoyan Boshev <s.boshev@xxxxxxxxxxx>

To:

	

Equinox development mailing list <equinox-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Date:

	

2008/09/03 07:51 AM

Subject:

	

Re: [equinox-dev] When is DS done loading services?


------------------------------------------------------------------------






Hi Otto,
I guess your problem is connected to the asynchronous processing of the
DS services.
As far as I understand the situation is: your application bundles are
started, then your application is started but at this moment not all of
the DS services are inited yet because they are being asynchronously
processed.

Unfortunately currently there is no way to find out when DS completes
the DS services processing.
I think if there was an option that DS bundle process the DS services in
the started bundles synchronously, it would solve your problem. So I
will open bug(enhancement) about that and hopefully this will be
implemented soon.
As a possible workaround you could observe the running threads and when
the thread with name "Component Resolve Thread" disappears this would
mean that DS bundle has no more work to do and eventually all of your DS
services are processed. I realize this is not a clean solution (that's
why I call it workaround) but at this moment I cannot find out a more
appropriate working solution without modifications in the DS bundle.

Stoyan


Cortez, Otto wrote:

I made a post to the Eclipse newcomers group a few weeks ago, but did
not get a response. I don’t know if this is the appropriate place for
this question, but hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.



We are building a headless RCP application and we would like to use DS
to make functionality available. The problem we are running into is
that not all of the services we declared through DS get loaded and are
visible before our application executes.



For example, I have a service A which needs 0..n instances of another
service B. The issue I'm running into is that if the implementations of
service B are spread across several bundles, then the service A will not
have seen all instances of service B when it is called since the
application starts (and sometimes ends) running before DS is done
looking through all the bundles and registering all the services in the
active bundles.

Is there a way to know when declarative services is done looking through
the active bundles and loading the services found in them? Am I missing
something?



It seems that using the plug-in registry may solve this issue. Is that
perhaps a better way to go?



Thanks,
Otto

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Mobile: +359 88 898 29 17_
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