Flexible, plug-and-play network middleware against network instability with R2-OSGi

As an emerging portable service platform, OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) is taking a more and more important role in modern Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). In order to improve the capability of using distributed services in network-based OSGi applications, R-OSGi (Remote OSGi) is invented. However, network-based SOA applications are prone to the big impact on Quality of Service (QoS) caused by network instability problem, which implies that developers have to deal with the potential R-OSGi networking exceptions at application layer. In this paper, we present an improved middleware based on the original OSGi, the Robust R-OSGi (R²-OSGi in abbreviation), which can deal with networking exceptions transparently to developers beneath the application layer. The middleware can automatically detect the various failures which might occur in current network and then select the pre-defined exception-handling strategies to proceed.