RL034 Miguel Pastor and Ray Auge on Modularization on OSGI

Radio Liferay

At Devcon 2013 I met with Miguel Pastor and Ray Auge, both Engineers and Core Developers at Liferay. They both have been involved in the latest modularization efforts, resulting in OSGi being now on the Feature List for Liferay 6.2.
We recorded this session in the break area of the conference, during one of the sessions in order to find some quiet time. Unfortunately, as you'll hear in this recording, we picked the time when Lunch was prepared, so the catering staff is setting up stacks of plates, heaps of cutlery and other noisy stuff. This episode might be the one with the most background noise we ever had on this podcast, but after all, it's in the background and I hope it doesn't distract too much. Be assured, the lunch was really nice.

With the main topics being OSGi and Modularity, we talked about:

• Middleware and Appservers that support OSGi
• 6.2 is the first release to officially be supporting OSGi
• Goal is to shrink Liferay's footprint
• The current state of OSGi in Liferay - is there anything left to do? (guess what - the answer is "yes")
• Extending Liferay with plugins without depending on the Appserver. Liferay can be extended through plugins in an Appserver - in future this should be a lot easier just extending with OSGi bundles. The current mechanism is extremely dependent on the Appserver we're running on.
• Deploying an OSGi plugin to Liferay completely decouples Liferay from the mechanisms of the Appserver,
• What will happen to the existing plugin types - namely "ext"?
• OSGi will make a difference for plugins that extend plugins - this works today, but is not straightforward.
• This way of modularization will help lowering the learning curve for developing plugins - making extensions easier to write with the classic Java knowledge background.
• Feature Bleed and Interdependencies between different unrelated parts of Liferay - as they exist today and will hopefully change in future