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Sunday, November 3, 2013

Visualizing OSGi services with D3.js

Because I couldn't resist writing a bit of code during my vacation I started playing with D3.js, a data visualization library for JavaScript, and used it to visualize dependencies between OSGi services. If you are already familiar with designing systems based on OSGi services you might just want to take a look at the video directly. If you need a little more introduction; continue reading.



We are using OSGi services for pretty much  everything; all our code lives within services. Services are the primary tool when implementing a modular architecture. By just using services, your code isn't necessarily modular yet however. A lot of thought has to go into the design of service interfaces and dependencies between services.

In a services based architecture it's obviously a good thing to re-use existing services when implementing new functionality. At the same time it's important to be careful with creating too many outgoing dependencies. If everything depends on everything else, it becomes very difficult to make any changes to the code (also known as "not modular"...). When implementing a system you will start to notice that some services are re-used by many other services. Although not an official name at all, I often call them core services; a service that plays a central role in your system. These services must be kept stable because major changes to it's interface requires a lot of work. Outgoing dependencies from these services should also be used with care. To guarantee stability of the service, it's good to keep the number of dependencies low. This prevents a ripple effect of changes when touching something. In practice, a core service should only depend on other services which are very stable. Do not depend on services that are likely to change often.

Many other services might not be used by any other services at all however, for example a scheduled job or a RESTful webservice that only serves a specific part of a user interface. These services can easily be replaced or even be discarded when no longer needed. In an agile environment this happens all the time. For these services it's not really a problem to depend on other services, specially not the core services of the system.

If your architecture is sound, you probably have a very clear idea about which services are your core services. Still, it's useful to actually visualize this to identify any services that have more incoming dependencies than you expected, or at least see which other services have a dependency on a certain service. And that's exactly what I did for this experiment.

We use Apache Felix Dependency Manager to create services and dependencies between them. Because of this I used the Apache Felix Dependency Manager API to create the list of dependencies between services. Note that this will not show services that are not created by Dependency Manager. The visual graph itself is created by D3.js based on this example.

The code is available on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/paul_bakker/dependency-graph/overview

3 comments:

  1. Hey Paul,

    Good example to get a quick insight in all the services and their dependencies. I was also doing some work on visualising the Dependency Graph in a project using Felix. Unfortunately we mixed it with quite some project specific knowledge so it's not shareable (yet). Do you have plans to share the code of this example somewhere by any change?

    Cheers,
    Rachid.

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  2. Sure I can make the code available. I will do that in the next few days (it's a bndtools project and I will publish the generated bundle).

    ReplyDelete
  3. The code is now available on BitBucket. Enjoy :)

    https://bitbucket.org/paul_bakker/dependency-graph/overview

    ReplyDelete