Question

I have a lovely command line driven OSGi application.
I now want to add a GUI using GWT.

It will need to deploy on a Tomcat server

Can someone please outline the steps needed? I seem to be spinning in cicles 🙂

Answer 1

If you have to deploy to Tomcat, then there’s a couple of options

1. Embed a framework (there’s a standard Framework API for this, see Felix example and this great overview)
2. Use PojoSR which will give you the OSGi service registry stuff without enforcing modularity. It’s often described as OSGi-lite. (see this and this)

Embedding is easy and portable (your WAR will work in any webapp container). If you’re planning to deploy your GWT app to Google AppEngine, then standard OSGi won’t work due to AppEngine restrictions on Threads and file system access – however PojoSR will work well on AppEngine.