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I'm currently in the process of developing a translation service for a host of web applications that was developed in house. I'm faced with the problem where we have packed all of the applications with properties files containing different languages to have i18n support.

One of the things that was suggested during a brain storming session was to make a translation service an OSGi module. Problem is I have 0 experience with OSGi and don't know how to go about it. Further talks and googleing suggests developing the services as a WAB.

The problem I am faced with is how do I call a resource from a WAB? Is it possible at all or am I going in the wrong path?

Any help would be greatly appropriated.

Regards S.

zeusontherun
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  • Is your project using OSGi already? – artbristol Aug 16 '12 at 13:32
  • No, I am currently working on a green project and We, I am currently evaluating the solution. OSGi Fragments seems like a good fit. – zeusontherun Aug 20 '12 at 10:36
  • In that case I would stay well away from OSGi. It will vastly complicate your build process and I doubt the benefits are there for your specific requirements. – artbristol Aug 20 '12 at 10:37
  • Can you suggest other alternatives since we have many applications which use property files for localization. It was suggested that we put the language settings related to each app in a database which is then externalized as a OSGi WAB removing the dependency of maintaining multiple property files. I am not sure how OSGi will complicate the build process. Can you please elaborate? – zeusontherun Aug 20 '12 at 11:14

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It's hard to say for sure without knowing more details, but you probably want to use a wab instead of a war, rather than inside of a war. A wab is just a war with osgi metadata. A nice approach for internationalisation (and the reason the idea came up, I'm guessing) is to use fragments for the resource bundles. This article has a tutorial of both developing a wab and then adding fragments for internationalisation.

I'd also advise against trying to load resources directly from an osgi bundle, since osgi encapsulation often makes the resources inaccessible unless you do ugly things with package imports and exports. Instead, look up a service and have it do the resource loading. Using something like declarative services or blueprint is much easier than programmatic service access.

Holly Cummins
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Unless you especially need run-time redeployment of the translation service, I recommend you just package it as a jar and include it in each web application. If you're using Maven or the like, updating the service will just be a case of upping the version number of the dependency, rebuilding, and redeploying the war.

artbristol
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  • True, it is ideal to package the i18n stuff in a property file and use Maven to package the localization resource bundle with every deployment. The problem is that, we envision that more localization will become available in the future for n number of applications and it would be ideal to keep the global localization stuff central. This could possibly eliminate deployment every time a new local comes online. – zeusontherun Aug 21 '12 at 08:13