In my earlier post, I went over the tack I took when developing a couple extension features for Open Liberty, and specifically the way I came at it with Tycho.

Shortly after I posted that, Alasdair Nottingham, the project lead for Open Liberty, dropped me a line to mention how programmatic service registration isn't preferred, and instead the idiomatic way is to use Declarative Services. I had encountered DS while fumbling my way through to getting these things working, but I had run into some bit of trouble or another, and I ended up settling on what I got working and not revisiting it.

Concepts

This was a perfect opportunity to go back and do things the right way, though, so I set out to do that this morning. In my initial reading up, I ran across a blog post from the always-helpful Vogella Blog that talks about coming at OSGi DS from essentially the same perspective I have: namely, having been used to Equinox and the Eclipse plugin/extension mechanism. As it turns out, when it comes to generic OSGi, Equinox can kind of poison your brain. The whole term "plug-in" instead of "bundle" comes from earlier Eclipse; "features", "update sites", and all of p2 are entirely Equinox-specific; and the "plugin.xml" extension mechanism is of a similar vintage. However, unlike some other vestiges that were tossed aside, "plugin.xml" is still in active use.

At its core, the Declarative Services system is generally similar to that route, in that you write classes to implement a given interface and then declare that your bundle provides that using XML files. The specifics are different - DS is more type-safe and it uses individual XML files in the "OSGI-INF" directory for each service - but the concept is similar. DS also has an annotation-based mechanism for this, which allows you to annotate your service classes directly and not worry about maintaining XML files. It's something of a compiler trick: the XML files still exist, but your tooling of choice (PDE, bnd, etc.) will generate the files based on your annotations. It took a bit for Eclipse to get on board with this, but, as of Neon, you can enable this processing in the preferences.

Implementation

Fortunately for me, my needs are simple enough that making the change was pretty straightforward. The first step was to delete the Activator class outright, as I won't need it for this. The second was to add an optional import for the org.osgi.service.component.annotations package in my Liberty extension bundle. I suspect that this is a bit of a PDE-ism: the annotations aren't even retained at runtime (and the package isn't present in the Liberty server), but this is the only mechanism Eclipse has to add a dependency for a plug-in project.

The annotation for the user registry was as straightforward as can be, needing a single line in this heavily-clipped version of the class:

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@Component(service=UserRegistry.class, configurationPid="dominoUserRegistry")
public class DominoUserRegistry implements UserRegistry {
}

With that, Eclipse started generating the associated XML file for me, and the registry showed up at runtime just as it had before.

The TrustAssociationInterceptor was slightly more complicated because it had some extra initialization properties set, in particular the one to mark it as executing before normal SSO. This was a little tricky in two ways: Java annotations don't have any mechanism for specifying a literal Map for properties, and the before-SSO property is a boolean, but I could only write a string. It turned out that the property, uh, property on the annotation has a little mini-DSL where you can mark a property with its type. The result was:

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@Component(
	service=TrustAssociationInterceptor.class,
	configurationPid=DominoTAI.CONFIG_PID,
	property={
		"invokeBeforeSSO:Boolean=true",
		"id=org.openntf.openliberty.wlp.userregistry.DominoTAI"
	}
)
public class DominoTAI implements TrustAssociationInterceptor {
}

Further Features

This is proving to be a pretty fun side project within a side project, and I think I'll take a crack at developing some more features when I have a chance. In particular, I'd like to try developing some API-contribution features so that they can be deployed to the server once and then used by web apps without having to package them (similar in concept to XPages Libraries). This is how Liberty implements its Jakarta EE specifications, and I could see making some extra ones. That's also exactly what CrossWorlds does, and so I imagine I'll crib a bunch of that work.