Improvements for OSGi support in Vaadin

[Sandared]

Hi,

I've spent the last weeks trying to run Vaadin in an OSGi environment. The current support for OSGi seems to be broken or only working in very specific settings (see here). Therefore, I developed my own integration that is currently working with Vaadin 8.2.1(see here) During the development of this integration I also had a look at the current OSGi integration regarding Themes/Widgetsets/Resources which could also be enhanced. A first draft of this enhancement could be seen here

What are those enhancements good for?

• No more need in core Vaadin to explicitly call VaadinResourceServiceImpl nor any dependencies to OSGi in the core Vaadin bundles. If you want Vaadin to be OSGi compatible all you will have to do is to add an additional bundle to your runtime.
• UIs will be Declarative Services that can have their own references to other OSGi components/services. The lifecycle of UIs is managed so that all dependencies are resolved before init() is called.
• New themes/widgetsets/resources can be made available by adding just one line to the manifest (currently a call to a static method of VaadinResourceServiceImpl is required and this only works if the bundles are started in the right order )

Is this an enhancement that you would like to see in the framework? Or do you have any plans on your own regarding enhancing OSGi support in Vaadin that I'm not aware of?

If this is an enhancement you'd like to see I would prepare a pull request for this and rewrite my solution in Java (currently written in Xtend).

Kind regards, Thomas

[stale[bot]]

Hello there!

It looks like this issue hasn't progressed lately. There are so many issues that we just can't deal them all within a reasonable timeframe.

There are a couple of things you could help to get things rolling on this issue (this is an automated message, so expect that some of these are already in use):

• Check if the issue is still valid for the latest version. There are dozens of duplicates in our issue tracker, so it is possible that the issue is already tackled. If it appears to be fixed, close the issue, otherwise report to the issue that it is still valid.
• Provide more details how to reproduce the issue.
• Explain why it is important to get this issue fixed and politely draw others attention to it e.g. via the forum or social media.
• Add a reduced test case about the issue, so it is easier for somebody to start working on a solution.
• Try fixing the issue yourself and create a pull request that contains the test case and/or a fix for it. Handling the pull requests is the top priority for the core team.
• If the issue is clearly a bug, use the Warranty in your Vaadin subscription to raise its priority.

Thanks again for your contributions! Even though we haven't been able to get this issue fixed, we hope you to report your findings and enhancement ideas in the future too!

[mstahv]

@mmerruko , @Sandared Have you seen this PR: https://github.com/vaadin/framework/pull/11335

I guess that is fixing part of the enhancements proposed here as well, but is there still something else missing from core Vaadin (or missing a PR)? I know there is the add-on by Mirjam, but I guess the changes are rather generic, so they'll would be better to get into the core.

[Sandared]

Frankly, I didn't follow this topic much longer as vaadin flow seems to fit my purposes better and also gets more and more osgi compliant ;)

The issues I remeber having with Vaadin 8 in an OSGi environment were the following:

• VaadinResourceService not loaded because of wrong bundle start order (seems to be fixed by #11335 )
• UI not being a @Component in OSGi (seems to be fixed by @mmerruko 's commits)
• Wasn't able to apply a custom theme when in debug mode, if I remeber correctly this had something to do with the on-the-fly sass compilation which could not handle resources within bundles. I think the sass compiler would have needed a third option to load osgi resources, i.e., resources within bundles. I don't know if this issue has been fixed by someone. But anyway, this was rather an edge case I think.

Hope that helps. Kind regards, Thomas

[stale[bot]]

Hello there!

We are sorry that this issue hasn't progressed lately. We are prioritizing issues by severity and the number of customers we expect are experiencing this and haven't gotten around to fix this issue yet.

There are a couple of things you could help to get things rolling on this issue (this is an automated message, so expect that some of these are already in use):

• Check if the issue is still valid for the latest version. There are dozens of duplicates in our issue tracker, so it is possible that the issue is already tackled. If it appears to be fixed, close the issue, otherwise report to the issue that it is still valid.
• Provide more details how to reproduce the issue.
• Explain why it is important to get this issue fixed and politely draw others attention to it e.g. via the forum or social media.
• Add a reduced test case about the issue, so it is easier for somebody to start working on a solution.
• Try fixing the issue yourself and create a pull request that contains the test case and/or a fix for it. Handling the pull requests is the top priority for the core team.
• If the issue is clearly a bug, use the Warranty in your Vaadin subscription to raise its priority.

Thanks again for your contributions! Even though we haven't been able to get this issue fixed, we hope you to report your findings and enhancement ideas in the future too!