Hi. I've converted an application to run on OSGi and it works nicely inside Felix. I've got to the point where I need to consider the user's experience with installation and first-use of my product.
The product itself is a consumer oriented piece of software which is installable on the user's computer. Therefore, the 'profile' here is an application installed many times. Because this is a consumer piece of software, installation -> start needs to be one step. For Windows and Linux users there is an installer, built using IzPack. Currently, the installer installs all the bundles into a bundle/ directory and Felix does its auto deploy thing over that directory, auto deploying each bundle. This works, but only the very first time the application is installed. If the user happens to install a later version over the top, you get multiple JARs for the same bundle, because the version number is in the JAR file. This doesn't work with the auto deployer which appears to use the bundle location as the identifying characteristic of a bundle, rather than its symbolic name. I'm not why it does that, but anyway it means I get all sorts of problems with multiple instances of Jetty running. I notice the felix-cache has different bundleN entries for the same bundle. Later on, in-app update provisions updated versions of the bundle from a source online. This is just my code downloading bundles and installing them. Therefore, different versions of the bundle will end up in felix-cache. Later re-installations of the product may mean even more versions lying about. This scares me! This seems a fairly flawed approach so I'm beginning to wonder whether I understand the implications of Felix auto deploy and updating in the way I am suggesting. I'm wondering if I'm approaching this in completely the wrong way. I can see other solutions for provisioning (in the sense of finding, downloading, resolving and installing bundles) such as OBR. Would it be better to use that? Has anyone else got any advice or done something similar? Thanks, Dan
