wwerner's blog

Helios comes with an OSGi console that is accessible from the GUI directly. This reminded me of the existence of an API to add custom commands to the console. I found this to be a simple and powerful concept; yet I perceive this feature to be rarely used in practice.
With equinox being used on the server more and more, adding your own custom application management commands is a simple way to provide for executing application specific maintenance tasks. How about a command that gathers all logs, creates a heap dump, zips everything, puts it onto an FTP server and sends you the download link by mail? Or perhaps you simply want to run some sanity checks?

In this post, we’ll create a custom command for the OSGi console that simply executes a JUnit test and prints the results.

More importantly, we’ll have to snoop around in internal eclipse packages to figure out how to attach the command to the existing console. We’ll try to do our snooping effectively. And we’ll exploit the dynamic nature of OSGi to streamline our development/build/test cycle (and thats gonna be fun).

Now that we’ve implemented our greeting application, it’s time to make it more enterprisey. We can’t have it just echo any greeting, can we? We’ll need to make sure that only greetings from a predefined list can be chosen as current greeting, so we can have committees that can spend time discussing and defining greeting standards.
As we want to make our lives easier (let’s assume the committee will change it’s mind every few days or so), we’ll implement a greeting manager that can be used to edit the list of approved greetings.

Beside rants at software development for The Enterprise™, expect a short introduction of the Restlet base classes that are typically assembled into a server application.