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At runtime the Ignite user installs all required bundles (including ignite-core, any optional Ignite bundles as well as the application bundles) using either the standard mechanisms defined by the OSGi spec, or relying on the container's implementation-specific capabilities. For example, Apache Karaf (an OSGi implementation) offers a packaging/deloyment concept called "Feature" which roughly speaking is a list of bundles to automatically deploy when the OSGi Framework starts.

Marshalling

The main problem we need to solve in order to allow Ignite OSGi enablement is the marshalling. More specifically the issue is with deserialization of the classes that are provided by the bundles other than the JDK and the Ignite bundle itself.

Feature repository for Apache Karaf

We should provide a Feature Repository to make it easier for Apache Karaf users to install Ignite and, optionally, Ignite modules. There should be one feature per module that also installs all necessary library dependencies.

Marshalling

The main problem we need to solve in order to allow Ignite OSGi enablement is the marshalling. More specifically the issue is with deserialization of the classes that are provided by the bundles other than the JDK and the Ignite bundle itself.

When the Ignite transport layer receives a message it needs to figure out how to deserialize the bytes and for that it needs to know the bundle that provides the class to be deserialized. To make things more complex, the class may contain other classes that come from other bundles, When the Ignite transport layer receives a message it needs to figure out how to deserialize the bytes and for that it needs to know the bundle that provides the class to be deserailized. To make things more complex, the class may contain other classes that come from other bundles, and so on recursively. In general, what is needed then is a way to map an FQN of a class to its bundle (and hence to the class loader).

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It's responsibility of the implementation to ensure that the encoded representation is sufficient to unambiguously identify the correct bundle during deserialization.

ClassLoaderCodec

The ClassLoaderCodec should be called for every Object during serialization and deserialization and should be part of the IgniteConfiguraiton:

ClassLoaderCodec

The ClassLoaderCodec should be called for every Object during serialization and deserialization and should be part of the IgniteConfiguraiton:

public interface ClassLoaderCodec {
    @Nullable public Object encodeClassLoader(Class<?> cls, 

public interface ClassLoaderCodec {
    @Nullable public Object encodeClassLoader(Class<?> cls, ClassLoader clsLdr) throws IgniteException;
    public ClassLoader decodeClassLoader(String fqn, @Nullable Object encodedClsLdr) throws IgniteException;
}

ClassLoaderCodec Implementations

Ignite will come with 2 OSGI class loader codecs out of the box, pessimistic and optimistic, leaving users with opportunity to provide their own custom class loader codecs as well (potentially for non-OSGI environments).

In general in OSGi, the same package may be exported by multiple bundles and therefore an FQN may not be sufficient to look up the correct class loader. In such cases, the codec implementation must employ a pessimistic approach and encode enough information (for example, the bundle symbolic name, plus the bundle version) for the deserializer to be able to resolve the FQN to the correct class loader. Such implementation will work for all use cases, but it introduces some overhead and increases the size of the serialized messages.

    public ClassLoader decodeClassLoader(String fqn, @Nullable Object encodedClsLdr) throws IgniteException;
}

ClassLoaderCodec Implementations

Ignite will come with 2 OSGI class loader codecs out of the box, pessimistic and optimistic, leaving users with opportunity to provide their own custom class loader codecs as well (potentially for non-OSGI environments).

In general in OSGi, the same package may be exported by multiple bundles and therefore an FQN may not be sufficient to look up the correct class loader. In such cases, the codec implementation must employ a pessimistic approach and encode enough information (for example, the bundle symbolic name, plus the bundle version) for the deserializer to be able to resolve the FQN to the correct class loader. Such implementation will work for all use cases, but it introduces some overhead and increases the size of the serialized messages.

However, for the applications that can enforce one-to-one mapping of packages to bundles, a simplified (optimistic) approach can be used instead. With this approach, no encoding of the class loader is required (encodeClassLoader() returns null), and only the FQN is used for decoding of the class loader.

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