Enhanced Remote Services/Remote Service Admin Tooling

In ECF 3.10.0/Mars a Remote Services Perspective was introduced. This perspective included an Endpoint Discovery View allowing endpoints to be discovered (via network discovery and/or xml/EDEF-file-based discovery), examined, and imported for use as a remote service.

In this release, there's a new Remote Service Admin (RSA) manager view. This view presents the Exported Services and Imported Endpoints for the RSA running within Eclipse, allowing the programmer to examine and manipulate exported services and imported endpoints. This tooling may be used to test and debug ECF Remote Services by monitoring and managing the remote services export, discovery, and import.

For example, here is a screenshot showing an endpoint that has been exported and published for by a remote host (e.g. by a Karaf-based host), and then discovered via the Zeroconf protocol (presented in the Endpoint Discovery View)

Note that the imported endpoint (the remote service proxy) is also presented in the OSGi Services View, and the properties associated with the selected mported endpoint are presented in the properties view.

The Imported Endpoints presented in the RSA Manager view can be Unimported (again via context menu). As well, if remote service hosts are exported, they will appear under the Exported Services group in the RSA Manager, and can also be unexported via the RSA Manager context menu.

Remote Services Distribution Provider API

Remote Services distribution providers are responsible for implementing the remote method call...i.e. the serialization of parameters and return values, and the communications protocol used to communicate between the caller and the remote service. caller.

ECF's Remote Services implementation allows the use of custom or alternative distribution providers. Allows ECF's Remote Services implementation to be used with any desired serialization mechanism and any suitable communications protocol.

For easy creation of distribution providers, we've added a new IRemoteServiceDistributionProvider interface so that a distribution provider may be registered for use via the OSGi whiteboard pattern. Here is the org.eclipse.ecf.remoteservice.provider package.

For example, here is a distribution provider implemented using Jersey Jax-RS REST framework. A single instance of this class is registered via Declarative Services and any remote services using the 'ecf.jaxrs.jersey.server' config type will use Jersey as the distribution mechanism. See the examples in the JaxRSProviders repo for complete examples of using this provider.

New Distribution Providers

Using the remote services distribution provider API above, several new distribution providers have been created:

• Jax-RS Providers (Jersey, CXF, Resteasy)
• Hazelcast
• MQTT