Hello,
recently I've thought of using JSF in an OSGi environment because of the
greater modularity it would provide for developers. JSF already provides
reusability regarding the user interface, i.e. JSF provides the
possibility to create user interface components, but what do you do if
you want to reuse more aspects of previous applications than just user
interface fragements? How to reuse dialogs, i.e. certain workflows, etc..?
OSGi already does provide these reusability features and hence I've
adapted MyFaces in a way so that it's runnable in an OSGi container.
Basically you just have to deploy an implementation of the OSGi HTTP
Service (e.g. Pax Web [1]), the two MyFaces bundles (myfaces-api and
myfaces-impl) and your web application bundles. Basically a
BundleListener keeps track of all bundles being deployed to the OSGi
container, so if the user installs a JSF bundle MyFaces gets notified
and merges the current configuration with the configuration of the new
bundle.
However, even though I've been able to implement a running version, I
had to change major parts of MyFaces. For example, using OSGi you can't
use the context class loader if you want to create a new instance for a
class that resides in a different bundle (think of managed beans,
MyFaces is responsible for creating the instance, but the class file is
located in a different bundle) and hence I had to rewrite the
configuration module (e.g. a LifecycleProvider implementation receives
just a class name of the managed bean to instantiate assuming that it
can load the class using the context class loader, but that won't work
in the case of an OSGi environment).
Therefore I'd like to know if I should start contributing these changes?
(and if so, should I create a different branch at first, etc.?)
regards,
Bernhard
[1]: http://wiki.ops4j.org/display/paxweb/Pax+Web
