Hey guys, I just wanted to give you some background information on DeploymentProcessors as added via ACE-186. The concept is fairly straightforward. Right now, a management agent talks to the DeploymentServlet. Usually it first queries for a list of available versions of the software, and if there is a new version, it requests that version (or a delta). Right now, the version is always delivered as a deployment package, which is great, because it's a standard OSGi compendium service, and very extensible, so the ideal fit for OSGi.
But what if the target is not a "standard" OSGi framework? Recently, Karl has been working on PojoSR (http://code.google.com/p/pojosr/) and that is slowly gaining some traction. Also, one can imagine that other (more or less modular) containers could be used together with ACE. Or even, OSGi containers that run on different platforms, such as Felix running on Android (on the Dalvik VM). In all these scenarios you probably want to deliver the bundles in a (slightly) different format which is the motivation for this system. I also considered just adding different endpoints (you could just register another servlet) but then you end up duplicating a lot of code from the existing servlet so in the end, I discarded that option. Greetings, Marcel
