I've been having a private email discussion with one of the OSGi people,
he instantly understood my problem domain. They also have pondered the
problem of Binary compatibility over time and the potential of static
analysis.
I guess that makes sense as this is really the problem domain of OSGi,
not jini, it was suggested that results from static analysis performed
at build time should be included as additional metadata in bundles.
That changes my implementation, I was going to perform the static
analysis at the codebase, however this should be done at build time.
Having said that, it would be still useful to confirm the metadata is
correct using static analysis at the codebase for security reasons.
Quote: "I think this is worthwhile for OSGi. It probably fits in the
area of management agents, i.e., you could build some functionality on
top of OSGi that uses this additional information for deploying updates."
So I guess that jini codebase services that distribute OSGi bundles
would be very useful for code evolution over time in a distributed
environment where OSGi is used to control local JVM package visibility
and sharing of compatible bytecode between jini services.
The best part about OSGi bundles is that developers aren't forced to use
OSGi or the metadata, bundles can still be used as ordinary jar files.
Cheers,
Peter.
