Service Discovery and Remote Services with the Eclipse Communication Framework

Jan S. Rellermeyer, Markus Kuppe, Scott Lewis The Eclipse Communication Framework has released its version 2.0 with Eclipse Ganymede. Two of the new and noteworthy features that ECF is bringing to the mainstream Eclipse developer are service discovery and distributed OSGi services. In this talk, we will introduce the various tools and concepts that ECF provides the users with. Different service discovery protocols like SLP and mDNS are available for finding remote services in the network. The interaction with remote services is supported through distributed shared objects or the R-OSGi system. On top, applications can either access remote services completely transparently, or take advantage of an explicit API that allows advanced interaction patterns like asynchronous calls or futures. We will compare the ECF API with other related concepts and the ongoing efforts in the OSGi Alliance on RFC 119.

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