Paremus Service Fabric

Development Tools

Paremus has invested heavily in providing tooling to simplify the development, dependency management, testing, release and operational processes associated with successfully realizing the full potential of OSGi™ in the enterprise.

The result of our efforts is the freely available Sigil open source project, which provides unified IDE (Eclipse) and Server Side Build (Ant/Ivy) development tooling.

Sigil provides sophisticated bundle dependency management, access to multiple public and private OSGi bundle repositories, and allows the developer to test the resultant composite applications from Eclipse within a local Paremus Service Fabric runtime.

Sigil uses OSGi metadata to calculate project dependencies dynamically at build time, using the same Import-Package metadata that is used by OSGi at runtime. The OSGi-aware bundle repository, can access existing bundles in the file system or from an OSGi Bundle Repository (OBR). For example, Sigil provides an OBR index to the SpringSource Enterprise Repository, enabling use of the contents for automatic resolution of Import-Package dependencies.

With headless build support as well as integrated Eclipse support, Sigil uses the same properties file to define bundles in the IDE and stand-alone. This ensures that bundles created by either the IDE or headless builds are identical. Sigil automatically resolves imports using the configured repositories, provides log integration and offers full debug support (break points, source code, step through, etc). The Sigil headless build supports Ivy with seamless integration into existing Ivy builds, and automatic injection of Ivy dependences by resolving the Import-Package metadata.

The impetus for Sigil came from our own and customer experiences of developing OSGi-based applications. We are using Sigil to develop and build the Paremus Service Fabric, and wanted to encourage the uptake of OSGi by making it available to the wider community as an open source project. So we donated Sigil to the Apache open source community and it is currently undergoing a transition as a sub-project of Apache Felix.