Over recent months, the Open Source Gateway Initiative (OSGi) has been gaining attention in the application server technology space. Major vendors, such as IBM, BEA and JBoss, have moved to OSGi as the platform for universal middleware in order to distinguish themselves by being the first to offer new capabilities and services in today's fast-paced, technology-driven markets. While OSGi makes application server products more modular and flexible, its adaptation in the rich Internet application (RIA) area is only getting started.
Solstice is the first framework to integrate Flex and OSGi in a single out-of-the-box package.
Solstice provides a rich set of open source products and technologies, including Adobe Flex, Adobe BlazeDS, OSGi, Eclipse Equinox, Eclipse Equinox Servlet Bridge, JBoss, Felix and db4o.
By doing so, Solstice offers:
- An OSGi 4 compliant container with Flex-based management console.
- A platform for deploying modular Flex applications as OSGi bundles.
- Rich server functionality using Blaze DS to expose OSGi services as remote objects.
At present Solstice is deployed as a WAR file, but it will soon become a pure OSGi stack with no application server required. Thus, developers will be able to use whichever OSGi platform they prefer. This will enable RIA developers to develop OSGi bundles that contain Flex modules, so end users can use the Flex-based interface to install and control them.
Solstice is currently in its alpha release. But, we will continue to monitor OSGi development in the RIA space over the period ahead.