A survey on approaches for addressing dependability attributes in the OSGi service platform

Abstract

The OSGi service platform is being used in software industry as the de facto middleware for developing and deploying modular Java applications, using SOA principles in centralized solutions. OSGi provides a dynamic platform where components and services can be deployed and undeployed at runtime, attracting the attention of both commercial and research projects. Although the platform is used in fields with different purposes (e.g. experimentally used in healthcare, commercially used in application servers) but where dependability should be a pre-requisite for applications, it is a fact that the OSGi technology does not provide a dependable platform for executing applications with such needs. Different research efforts try to address dependability attributes (availability, integrity, maintainability, reliability, safety, and confidentiality) in the OSGi service platform, but not necessarily all of these attributes are completely covered or explicitly addressed in the textual references. We provide a brief survey on recent research efforts that try to improve dependability in the OSGi service platform. We analyze and identify which attributes are addressed on each approach, and provide a discussion on the employed techniques, similarities and results achieved on such approaches. Al-though this survey remains limited to one technology (OSGi), the problematic as well as all the employed techniques in the analyzed efforts are pertinent to other service and component-based systems.