OSGi standards support

ECF 3.5.1 includes an implementation of OSGi 4.2 Remote Service Admin (RSA) specification. The is a full and complete implementation of an enterprise specification, which defines a management agent service (RSA) for remote service administration. ECF's flexible and extensible architecture allows easy replacement of discovery and distribution modules while assuring full compliance with the OSGi RSA specification. More on the Remote Service Admin agent and the unique features of the ECF RSA implementation is available here. See also here for more information about ECF's implementation of OSGi remote services.

As of 3.5.1/Indigo, ECF has run its remote services/RSA implementation through the OSGi Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) to assure compliance with the specification, and fixed all of TCK-uncovered bugs.

XML-RPC Provider

ECF 3.5 includes a XML-RPC Provider. It implements the ECF Remote Services API (org.eclipse.ecf.remoteservice). The provider therefore adds the possibility to use a XML-RPC based infrastructure for the registration, distribution and use of OSGi remote services. Remote Service invocation through a proxy and/or async proxy is supported, too. In addition, this provider can serve as an example to developers that wish to create their own provider, based upon a transport of their choice (e.g. Restlet, JAX-RS, proprietary transports, etc).

ECF Remote Services/RSA on other OSGi frameworks

ECF4Felix allows ECF to run on the Felix OSGi framework. Until version 3.4 ECF ran on the Equinox framework only because of unnecessary dependencies. ECF can now run on other frameworks. So far, we've tested on Felix only, but we are interested in testing on other frameworks. If you are willing to help with testing ECF Remote Services/RSA on another framework, please send an email to the ecf-dev mailing list).

ECF Documentation Project

ECF recently started the ECF Documentation Project. This project is an approach to improve the amount and quality of the ECF documentation with the help of the committer, contributor, and consumer communities. It also aims to use of ECF for new and existing consumers.

Maven Support and other Build Infrastructure Improvements

ECF received a donation from Remain Software to buy new build hardware (many thanks to Remain Software!). This new build server is hosted by OSU labs, and is available here. ECF was able to introduce Maven releases and nightly repositories, and these are avalable here.

DNS-Service Discovery

ECF 3.4 includes a remote services discovery provider based upon DNS-SD. DNS-SD is a WAN network service discovery protocol based upon standard DNS. This allows OSGi 4.2 standard remote services to be exposed for WAN-based service discovery using DNS. DNS-SD requires configuring an authoritative DNS server in order to work, so to use ECF DNS-SD please see the ecf-dev mailing list and this wiki page.

Atom/RSS-based REST API Implementation

ECF 3.3 has a REST Remote Services API. This API allows the usage of several serialization formats...with JSON and XML supported in ECF 3.3. Now, support for Atom/RSS-based serialization for REST-based remote services has been added. This makes it easy for clients to use Atom/RSS in their REST clients (that use the ECF's REST API).

Improvements to Distributed EventAdmin

ECF 3.3 includes an implementation of Distributed EventAdmin as described here. This release includes a number of enhancements to the DistributedEventAdmin implementation API, to allow for easy customization of Distributed EventAdmin...e.g. to allow for custom Event serialization/deserialization of OSGi Event instances, and to easily customize/add Event persistence. See the javadocs for the DistributeEventAdmin class here.

Migration to GIT

ECF has moved GIT for project source code control...in order to allow and encourage greater community involvement with the ongoing project development. See this ecf-dev mailing list thread for more information.

Bug Fixes

Between ECF 3.5.1/Indigo and ECF 3.5.2, there were 48 bugs resolved or closed.