An extended distributed OSGi architecture for implementation of SOA

With the development of modern network technology, the distributed construction is considered to represent the trend of SOA. Since it is more likely to be a theoretic framework for a macroscopic system rather than practical software architecture to implement it, the urgent problem is that there is no standard development pattern for implementation of SOA. On the other hand, OSGi, which is integrated with service as the smallest unit, shares common goal with SOA, may make contributions to the implementation of SOA by providing practical software architecture. However OSGi has the shortage that the operation is limited in one JVM and communications of OSGi services can not be extended to different hosts. OSGi should be extended to distributed architecture in order to support distributed SOA implementation. Attempts are made in this article to design an extended distributed OSGi architecture for the purpose of developing a practical development pattern for SOA implementation. In this article, three new independent OSGi services are designed to implement distribution without modifying the existed OSGi code. They are basic service, registry service and proxy service. In the new distributed OSGi runtime environment, services in different JVM could call each other and the whole processes are transparent.