December 18th, 2009
4:52 pm
Eclipse Glassfish Plugin loses sync with Glassfish start/stop state

Posted under Eclipse
Tags , , ,

This appears to be an issue if you start Glassfish (2.1.1) outside of Eclipse (3.5.1) – Eclipse does not then always sync with it properly. It may try to start it when it is already started and fail, then fail to publish/run projects correctly.
There is an old bug logged on this here. It claims to have been resolved, but the resolution does not appear to be seamless – it appears that Eclipse cannot fully integrate with an externally started Glassfish.

I expect this to be sorted with Glassfish V3 as this is fully OSGI compliant.
In the meantime, the answer seems to be to allow Eclipse to fully control Glassfish, i.e. start and stop it itself, and to not start Glassfish externally when using Eclipse.

No Comments »

December 4th, 2009
4:30 pm
OSGi

Posted under Java
Tags , ,

OSGI is an acronym for the Open Services Gateway Initiative, an open standards organisation formed to promote the specification of a Java based services platform that can be remotely managed. The Acronym is now obsolete, and instead the organisation is called the OSGi Alliance.

Eclipse is an OSGi compliant platform, and uses OSGi to manage its services and plugins. An OSGi plugin is quickly recognisable by the fact that its library jars are broken down to a fine grained level to allow flexible deployment, and have long names consisting of a package prefix and version number information. A typical example of an OSGi style jar is this core Java persistence jar :-

org.eclipse.persistence.core_1.1.3.v20091002-r5404.jar

Glassfish V3 is also OSGi compliant, but Glassfish V2.1 and earlier are not.

An overview and details of the OSGi concept and specification may be found on Wikipedia here.

No Comments »