João Tiago de Jesus Elias Ferreira


A-OSGi: A framework to support the construction of autonomic OSGi-based applications


Tese submetida para provas de mestrado em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.

Abstract

The OSGi specification is becoming widely adopted to build complex applications. It offers adequate support to build modular applications, based on the composition of small, reusable and self-contained modules, called bund les. Bund les can be added and removed in runtime without stopping the entire application. Bundles can be loosely coupled by leveraging on OSGi service-oriented architecture support.

Complex applications have been built on top of OSGi, resulting from the composition of a large number of bundles with many inter-dependencies. Although OSGi facilitates the manage- ment of a complex application (because of the modularity introduced), this is still a complex and time-consuming task.

This dissertation presents A-OSGi, a framework that leverages on the native features of the OSGi platform to support the construction of autonomic OSGi-based applications. Autonomic applications present self-management capabilities, that ease the execution of the management tasks. A-OSGi offers a number of complementary mechanisms for this purpose, such as: the ability to extract indicators for the performance of deployed bundles, mechanisms that allow to have a fine grain control of how bundles bind to services and to gather this information in runtime, and a policy language that allows to define the autonomic behavior of the OSGi application.

A prototype of A-OSGi has been implemented to illustrate the capabilities of our architecture. To this goal, we have implemented a number of mechanisms that integrate several existing technologies and tools. The prototype was evaluated with a proof-of-concept case study, where the application is adapted in face of a changing workload. Results show that the application exhibits a better performance when compared with the execution of the application without adaptation.


Publicações

A-OSGi: A framework to support the construction of autonomic OSGi-based applications
João Tiago de Jesus Elias Ferreira
MSc Thesis. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.
October, 2009.
Available BibTeX, MSC Thesis, and mid-term report.
A-OSGi: A framework to support the construction of autonomic OSGi-based applications.
J. Ferreira, J. Leitão and L. Rodrigues
Proceedings of the Third International ICST Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communication Systems, Limassol, Cyprus, Sep, 2009.
Available BibTeX, abstract (html) and report (pdf).

Luís Rodrigues