OSGi DevCon 2008
NASA has been using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) as the foundation for many of its rover operations tools for several years. Recently, we started using the Equinox project to extend our applications to the server as well. Along the way, we discovered REST, an intuitive, lightweight methodology for building web applications. In this tutorial, we will share the techniques that we have learned to combine these technologies into web services that are easy to develop, deploy, and use.
This tutorial will be focused on an entertaining set of space-related hands-on exercises that will teach participants to develop, integrate and deploy RESTful web applications on top of OSGI. Participants will walk away with an example RCP application and its Equinox server side support, along with an understanding of how each component functions. The presentation will also discuss issues associated with maintaining the server side code, securing the web applications, and performance. We will be deploying web based services through extension points, so the users will also be able to extend the example project to integrate additional web-services or use the skeleton for their own server side application. We will finally deploy the application to a tomcat server for production usage.
This tutorial will provide a hands-on demonstration of how Equinox and the Restlet framework make a unique combination that takes advantage of the powerful features offered by OSGI and the simplicity offered by REST. Web based services can offer a new whole new set of features to complement an RCP application, and we will demonstrate how simple this can be with a solid and battle tested framework behind the web applications.
Audience
We recommend that audience members have basic familiarity with plugin development and come prepared to code. Audience members without development experience will gain background information on evaluating Equinox for the architecture of their web based applications.