getting started with osgi + felix

Question

Which packages of Felix do I need to get started? There are a zillion of them on the downloads page.

(p.s. is the name a reference to the Odd Couple + in contrast to OSGI's "Oscar" reference framework? this occurred to me after reading one of the tutorial pages & I got a chuckle out of it.)

Answer 1

You just need to download the "main" distribution at:
http://apache.mirror.clusters.cc/felix/felix-1.8.0.tar.gz (it is the first download link)

Unzip it, enter in the felix-1.8.0 directory and type
$ java -jar bin/felix.jar

The Felix console will appear, type "help" to get started

Answer 2

My answer is not really about "how to", but about "where" to look.

I highly recommend OSGi and Apache Felix 3.0 Beginner's Guide by Walid Joseph Gédéon. I was using Equinox but after this book switched to Felix, it is just so well written.

Regarding felix bundles I am most commonly running Gogo Comman+Runtime+Shell, iPOJO, Log and Http (jetty/whiteboard).

P.S.: Just to add another book, that I think will become a classic - OSGI in Action. You can buy early access from manning. In combination with the Official OSGI Specs this will lay a solid foundation.

Answer 3

Actually this depends on what you are going to achieve. You can start with main Felix distribution, it already contains OSGi Bundle Repository implementation, so you will be able to download and start other Felix bundles.

Contrary, you can download and run Felix (or other OSGi implementations) using Pax Runner, you can control which sets of OSGi bundles to run easily.

There is also a way to start Felix with ServiceMix Kernel (called Karaf), it is based on Felix, but contains more bundles and supports hot deployment

Answer 4

Felix main (the System bundle - level 0) will always be there & active. For the rest it can be completely random, but there's the compendium bundles which are there for convenience purposes. The compendium bundles were defined by the OSGi alliance as part of the R4 spec.

I'm also new on OSGi. I found this page quite helpful on different ways of using Felix. it shows that you don't need to use any 'compendium' or other bundles.

Personally i like 'Declarative Services' compendium bundle (called SCR like in org.apache.felix.scr-1.0.8.jar) it makes true service architecture possible. There's also iPOJO, spring-DM etc. but its DS for me

You can read about compendium bundles in the OSGI R4 spec.