Plugable Swing – A Hello World OSGi Example
There are a lot of OSGi applications available, but a minority of them is aimed at the client side. Here I will list some on Swing:
- http://felix.apache.org/site/apache-felix-application-demonstration.html
- http://danielrohe.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/swing-application-on-osgi/
- http://www.toedter.com/blog/?p=33
- http://code.google.com/p/osgi-in-action/
- sip-communicator
Today I tried the same and had luck. It was very fast (~1h) to get all working what I wanted, because I shamelessly stole the code from the example of Apache Felix. It is even more easier than this example but should have the same effect: it shows how one could use OSGi even for a Swing application.
There is a host application called Swing On OSGi – Host with one JMenu which does not change (static) and one (dynamic) JMenu which could be changed from the available plugins (here only one: Swing On OSGi – PluginTest). The source code (Apache License 2) can be checkout via
svn checkout https://timefinder.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/timefinder/branches/swingosgi swingosgi
… you will need maven. After ‘mvn install’ for both projects you will only need to start the host application via your IDE or via
java -jar target/host-1.0.0.jar
Then if you see the “dynamic menu” with one menu entry (which was added from the plugin) all is fine:
If you have problems while building this send me an email or comment here.
I got the plugins even working in my timetabling application TimeFinder which uses the client-side framework called Spring Rich Client. The first plugin for Spring Rich Client - read more.
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Mike P(Okidoky) replied on Thu, 2009/09/17 - 12:30pm
Without having to dive in and download and try out stuff, I'm assuming that you've been able to create a swing application with a dynamic component that can be "redeployed"?
Would this be a way to have dynamically re-programmable components in a running application without having to restart the host application?
Peter ___ replied on Thu, 2009/09/17 - 1:56pm
Per-Erik Svensson replied on Mon, 2009/09/21 - 3:38am
We actually use it for plugins. Not that we have too many plugins but the two we do have are communicating via OSGi. We are also moving over more and more of our own internal code to OSGi-bundles to get an easy way of updating. Good to see others that have made the observation that this is a great way of using OSGi/Felix.
Also, I'm kind of missing Equinox/Eclipse in the list of client-side uses of OSGi. ;)
http://www.2c8.com/en
Peter ___ replied on Mon, 2009/09/21 - 10:59am
>We are also moving
Why are you moving? Advantages?
> Also, I'm kind of missing Equinox/Eclipse in the list of client-side uses of OSGi. ;)
yes, you can see examples with this in the next post, where I got OSGi it working with Spring Rich Client. Did you try to get it working with Spring DM or the mentioned alternatives (in the next post)? Or do you simply use directly the BundleContext interface?