| Re: [concierge-dev] How to embed concierge in Android |
|
Hi Danny,
There are a few things in Android that make it difficult to run OSGi. First of all, Android uses its own bytecode format (.dex), which makes it impossible to just load .jars with 'regular' java bytecodes in it. Second, Android applications have quite some things statically defined in their Android manifest, for example the activities, (Android) services, etc. This makes it difficult to for example start an OSGi runtime on Android and later start a bundle on it that adds another Activity, since this should be defined in the static xml of the app. Third, I have seen quite often that Android complains when the same class is loaded from multiple .dex files, which means you can run into trouble when running OSGi. Now, to run Concierge (or in general OSGi) on Android, this is how I do it. This is by no means the only way to do it, nor the "best" way to do it, but just how I got it working and which was good enough for me when I needed it: - Create an Android project (I have only used Eclipse IDE for this) - Drop your OSGi framework .jar in the "libs" folder (I don't know if the latest concierge built from the source tree will work on Android, I have included a built from my machine that should work) - Create an Android Activity or Service or whatever you want as starting point for the application - Initialize and start your OSGi framework from code. The ServiceLoader won't work, so to initialize a Concierge framework do: FrameworkFactory frameworkFactory = (FrameworkFactory) Class.forName("org.eclipse.concierge.Factory").newInstance(); You can create a new Framework instance with a configuration map, which you can start. - Now you have a OSGi instance running in your Android app. To load OSGi bundles, you'd have to start them from code. Place your OSGi bundles in your assets/ dir for example, so you can load them from there. Note here that these .jar files should contain .dex bytecodes. You can create a classes.dex file using the "dx" command that ships with the Android SDK, and package this file inside the .jar. If you want to access Android API's from within your OSGi bundles, mark these packages as framework exports. If you use bnd and bndtools, I once wrote a plugin to make this stuff a bit easier. You basically provide a .bndrun file in your Android project, and the plugin will put the .jars in the right places and also provides an "OSGiActivity" that automatically starts an OSGi runtime together with the bundles provided in the bndrun. It also provides a bnd plugin that automatically packages a .dex file in your jars for the bundles you build in the workspace. It has been a while since I worked on it, but you can find the code as part from my AIOLOS project at https://github.com/aiolos-dev/androsgi An example Android project using that plugin is found https://github.com/aiolos-dev/example/tree/master/org.example.android I have no idea if it still works with the newest Android versions though. Cheers, Tim On 05/27/2015 08:49 PM, Danny Fürniß wrote:
-- Tim Verbelen Department of Information Technology Broadband Communication Networks (IBCN) Ghent University - iMinds Gaston Crommenlaan 8 (Bus 201), B-9050 Gent, Belgium T: +32 9 33 14940 ; T Secr: +32 9 33 14900 F: +32 9 33 14899 E: tim.verbelen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx W : www.ibcn.intec.UGent.be |
Attachment:
org.eclipse.concierge-0.9.0.20150515141914.jar
Description: application/java-archive