Welcome
to Apache Felix
Welcome to the Apache Felix homepage.
News
- Felix Feathercast podcast
![]()
available. (May 23, 2007)
- Felix has graduated into a top level project!
- The Felix 0.8.0-incubator release is now available in the
downloads
section.
What
is Felix?
Felix is a community effort to implement the OSGi R4 Service
Platform![]()
, which includes the
OSGi framework and standard services, as well as providing and
supporting other interesting OSGi-related technologies. The ultimate
goal is to provide a completely compliant implementation of the OSGi
framework and standard services and to support a community around this
technology. Felix currently implements a large portion of the OSGi
release 4 specification, but additional work is necessary for full
compliance. Despite this fact, the OSGi framework functionality
provided by Felix is very stable.
OSGi technology originally targeted embedded devices and
home services gateways, but it is ideally suited for any project that
is interested in principles of modularity, component-oriented, and/or
service-orientation. OSGi technology combines aspects of these
aforementioned principles to define a dynamic service deployment
framework that is amenable to remote management. As an example of a
simple use case, Felix can be easily embedded into other projects and
used as a plugin or dynamic extension mechanism; it serves this purpose
much better than other systems that are used for similar purposes, such
as Java Management
Extensions (JMX)![]()
.
What
is OSGi?
The term OSGi generally refers to either the OSGi Alliance![]()
organization or the OSGi Service
Platform![]()
technology. The OSGi
Alliance is an independent corporation whose purpose is to define a
specification to deliver services over wide-area networks to local-area
networks and devices. The OSGi Alliance has numerous corporate and
individual participants who are ultimately responsible for defining the
features of the OSGi Service Platform. The OSGi Alliance releases a
detailed specification describing the features and capabilities of its
OSGi Service Platform, which can then be freely implemented by anyone.
For more more information on OSGi or to retrieve the specification,
refer to the OSGi Alliance web site.
