Using distributed OSGI with CXF to provide a Webservice-Interface

[Johannes Michler <or...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I'm quite new to (Distributed)-OSGI and after reading the
DOSGI-Documentation on the apache-cxf-homepage I still have some questions
left (both generally if using cxf is the right choice in my situation and
some technical questions). Here is what I'm planning to do:

I'm implementing an Eclipse RCP-Application that stores it's model to a
(oracle)-DB using eclipselink. For this persistence I implemented an
eclipse-plugin that "converts" my model-objects to DB-persistence-Objects
and writes/reads them to my DB using the jdbc-driver. In a first version, I
managed to bundle this "resourcemanager" plugin with my rcp application and
everything seems to work fine. Since the jdbc-protocol between this
rich-client and my database-server could produce problems traversing
firewalls I'd like to optionally put my resource-manager plugin to a server
near the database and to the access between the Rich-client and the
resourcemanager over the network using webservices. Anyway it should be
possible to bundle the same resourcemanager directly with the
rcp-application in some lightweight situations. So I thought of writing a
webservice-proxy on the rcp-side that can be loaded like the direct
db-resourcemanager by the rcp-app and that forwards the requests to a
ws-server that itself forwards this request to the original osgi-db-plugin:

RCP-Application --------as EclipsePlugin ----------> WS-Proxy ---------via
webservice ---------->Webserver(Webservice)--------like
eclipseplugin------->orgResourceManager


I wonder if I could use dosgi and cxf to provide ws-proxy and webserver. If
I understood this concepts right, it is quite easy to generate a webservice
with a wsdl for an osgi-service like my org. resourceManager. I can then
configure the WS-Proxy by specifying an XML-File saying where the Webservice
is located and everything should work (worked for a small sample I tried).
But is it possible to specify the URL of the Webservice in the RCP-App-GUI
instead of statically in the XML-File? Service-lookup-services aren't the
way to use here, are they?
Another thing is about authentication between the Application and the
Webserver. My idea would be that the webserver manages authentication using
a ldap-server or using some simple "password-file"-method. The RCP-User
should then provide username/Pw and ws-proxy and webserver should check if
the username/pw is correct. Could this be achieved with CXF and WS-Security?
And are there some documents how to achieve this? Or is it possible to host
the osgi-webservice and my osgi-resourcemanager in some kind of
application-server for managing things like security and eventually
persistence (Or should I just use the ecliipselink-osgi-bundles).


Is Apache CXF and DOSGI the right way to reach my goals? Or would It be
better to use an osgi-app-server as glassfish v3 and use it's
webservice-facilities (metro). (I'm new to this also but maybe it would be
better to search for a solution using these technologies?)
I read about a third way in a paper on exposing eclipse-plugins as
webservices using axis1 by IBM from 2006 using tomcat to serve the
osgi-environment, but this seems to be quite ugly :-(
And axis2 with osgi needs lots of manual building so I think this too
isn't the best solution.


Any help or thoughts on these issues would be highly appreciated,

bet regards
Johannes