R-OSGi: distributed applications through software modularization

In this paper we take advantage of the concepts developed for centralized module management, such as dynamic loading and unloading of modules, and show how they can be used to support the development and deployment of distributed applications. We do so through R-OSGi, a distributed middleware platform that extends the centralized, industry-standard OSGi specification to support distributed module management. To the developer, R-OSGi looks like a conventional module management tool. However, at deployment time, R-OSGi can be used to turn the application into a distributed application by simply indicating where the different modules should be deployed. At run time, R-OSGi represents distributed failures as module insertion and withdrawal operations so that the logic to deal with failures is the same as that employed to deal with dependencies among software modules. In doing so, R-OSGi greatly simplifies the development of distributed applications with no performance cost. In the paper we describe R-OSGi and several use cases. We also show with extensive experiments that R-OSGi has a performance comparable or better than that of RMI or UPnP, both commonly used distribution mechanisms with far less functionality than R-OSGi.