Chapter 3. Bundles and Application Contexts

Table of Contents

The Spring Dynamic Modules Extender bundle
Application Context Creation
Mandatory Service Dependencies
Application Context Service Publication
Bundle Lifecycle
The Resource abstraction
Accessing the BundleContext
Application Context Destruction
Stopping the extender bundle

The unit of deployment (and modularity) in OSGi is the bundle (see section 3.2 of the OSGi Service Platform Core Specification). A bundle known to the OSGi runtime is in one of three steady states: installed, resolved, or active. Bundles may export services (objects) to the OSGi service registry, and by so doing make these services available for other bundles to discover and to use. Bundles may also export Java packages, enabling other bundles to import the exported types.

In Spring the primary unit of modularity is an application context, which contains some number of beans (objects managed by the Spring application context). Application contexts can be configured in a hierarchy such that a child application context can see beans defined in a parent, but not vice-versa. The Spring concepts of exporters and factory beans are used to export references to beans to clients outside of the application context, and to inject references to services that are defined outside of the application context.

There is a natural affinity between an OSGi bundle and a Spring application context. Using Spring Dynamic Modules, an active bundle may contain a Spring application context, responsible for the instantiation, configuration, assembly, and decoration of the objects (beans) within the bundle. Some of these beans may optionally be exported as OSGi services and thus made available to other bundles, beans within the bundle may also be transparently injected with references to OSGi services.

The Spring Dynamic Modules Extender bundle

Spring Dynamic Modules provides an OSGi bundle org.springframework.osgi.bundles.extender. This bundle is responsible for instantiating the Spring application contexts for your application bundles. It serves the same purpose as the ContextLoaderListener does for Spring web applications. Once the extender bundle is installed and started it looks for any existing Spring-powered bundles that are already in the ACTIVE state and creates application contexts on their behalf. In addition, it listens for bundle starting events and automatically creates an application context for any Spring-powered bundle that is subsequently started. the section called “Bundle format and Manifest headers” describes what the extender recognizes as a "Spring-powered bundle".