Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Impala 1.0M4 released

I am pleased to announce the release of Impala 1.0M4, with preliminary support for OSGi.

Impala 1.0M4 now includes the ability to arrange Impala modules and their corresponding class loaders in a graph, instead of in a hierarchy as in previous releases. This feature offers application developers much more flexibility in choosing the appropriate module structures for applications.

1.0M4 is the first release of the project to include OSGi support. All Impala jars are now OSGi-compliant bundles. It is now possible to run Impala and its application modules in an OSGi container (currently Eclipse Equinox). Further improvements to Impala's support for OSGi are expected in subsequent releases.

At this stage Impala support for OSGi is still experimental. It is not recommended at this stage to use it in a production environment.

Impala promises to become the first and only project to offer a seamless transition to (and from) OSGi. There is no intention to make OSGi the default deployment model for Impala. However, OSGi is likely to become a good choice in the future for projects which will benefit from more rigorous management of third-party libraries than is possible using the traditional model.

More information on Impala's position with respect to OSGi can be found in this blog entry: http://impalablog.blogspot.com/2008/12/announcing-osgi-support-in-impala.html

For more information on this release see: http://code.google.com/p/impala/wiki/Release1_0M4Announcement

Phil Zoio

Impala Home: http://impala.googlecode.com

Friday, December 5, 2008

Announcing OSGi support in Impala

The soon to be released version of Impala will contain OSGi support. Does this mean that I've abandoned my mission to make Impala the simplest, most lightweight, test-friendly Java dynamic module framework. Absolutely not. The idea is simply to translate the benefits of Impala into an OSGi environment.

In the future, you will no longer need to choose between OSGi and Impala. You can have the best of both worlds. As long as you have some appreciation for the value and benefits of dynamic modules in Java, then Impala can work for you, no matter what your stance on OSGi is.

If you have not looked at OSGi and have no intention of doing so, then you're already well covered by Impala. If you are likely to look at OSGi in the future, then you can take advantage now of a framework which already does most of what you'd want, and move towards OSGi when you're ready. If you're already an OSGi enthusiast, I'd encourage you to take a look now at the Impala OSGi sample. Just point your Eclipse SVN repository explorer to http://impala.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/osgi-sample, check out the contained projects, and run any of the unit tests. You'll see something like the following, for MessageServiceTest.





















Note that the unit test is actually run on the Equinox OSGi container using the Spring Dynamic Modules test infrastructure. If this seems very easy, it's because it is - you won't even need to run any build scripts to get the example working!

If you're familiar with Impala you will notice that your OSGi-based application is configured in an identical manner to regular Impala applications, allowing a seamless transition from a plain Impala to an OSGi-based runtime (and back again). Impala's abstraction for representing relationships between modules provides a convenient mechanism for expressing and reloading module subgraphs, something you need to do continually during development.

Impala's OSGi support leverages much of the ground work covered by the Spring DM project. Impala also automatically generates OSGi compliant jars using Peter Kriens' BND tool when using Impala's build support, and provides a convenience target to generate an OSGi manifest so that you don't need to continually create a new set of OSGi jars each time you modify your application.

So is Impala's OSGi support production ready? Not at this point. Apart from the lack of any serious road testing, the big blocker is there is no explicit web support (yet). Additionally, Impala applications should have the option to use OSGi's service registry. I'd also like to better test framework integration so that Impala's interactive test runner and integration test suites can work equally well in an OSGi environment.

There are still some interesting technical challenges to overcome, and plenty of work to do to bring this project to its full potential. So if there is anyone out there with an interest in dynamic modules, Spring, OSGi , etc. and would like to help out, I'd love to hear from you.

So why add OSGi support to Impala?

The sweet spots in Impala are the ease in writing and running integration tests, ability to reload application modules, great web support, and a really simple, no-nonsense development environment. The sweet spots with OSGi is the way in which it gives you control over loading of third party libraries. OSGi allows you to dynamically reload third party libraries as well as concurrently run different versions of the same third party library classes, two things that you cannot do with Impala on its own.

I might stick my neck out a bit by saying that the features that I described above that are available in Impala on its own are much more valuable for the typical Java application than the extra features provided by OSGi. It is for this reason that Impala is built from the ground up to work in the simplest, most developer-friendly way possible without any reliance on third party runtime environments, tools or build systems.

That being said, there are clearly valid and potentially important use cases for the unique OSGi features. This, together with the growing industry momentum behind the technology, make OSGi support pretty much mandatory for any Java dynamic module system which demands to be taken seriously.

As I made clear at a talk in London last week, OSGi is the most powerful and sophisticated Java dynamic module system, particularly in its use of class loaders. But for many projects a simpler technology would suffice. Impala is the only dynamic module framework that offers the flexibility to choose easily between alternatives.

It is worth noting that in the upcoming version 1.0M4, Impala introduces support for expressing module dependencies via a graph rather than simply as a hierarchy. This allows individual modules to reuse functionality from multiple dependencies, rather than a single parent. This feature is particularly important both because it narrows the gap between Impala's built-in module support and that provided by OSGi, allowing for a more seamless and less constrained transition between the technologies.