Asynchronous OSGi – Promises for the masses

Asynchronous and event-driven programming models have become increasingly popular in Java, and the Actor pattern is commonly used to help design and build these systems. At its heart the Actor pattern is all about composing systems from modular components – exactly the same thing that OSGi is designed for. In the upcoming OSGi Enterprise R6 release (planned Q3 2014) OSGi will be adding some new APIs that allow bundles to communicate asynchronously, even using existing synchronous services.

This talk will describe the workings of the new Promises and Asynchronous Services APIs from OSGi RFC 206, showing you how you can start to take advantage of asynchronous programming between modular, loosely-coupled services. It will also demonstrate how OSGi Remote Services can transparently integrate within the asynchronous application, allowing completely non-blocking interactions in distributed environments.