Chapter 15. Web applications and web services
This chapter covers
- Using the OSGi HTTP Service specification to serve content and servlets
- Using the OSGi Web Applications specification to deploy WAR files
- Using the OSGi Remote Services specification to provide and consume web services
This is it: the last chapter. We hope that throughout the course of this book, we’ve been able to convince you that OSGi technology is fairly easy to use and extremely powerful. This final chapter touches on an area that we haven’t covered yet but that is hugely important to many modern developers: web applications and web services. We’ll show you how to build and deploy web applications using OSGi, and the benefits this technique can bring to traditional web-development frameworks. You’ll reuse a lot of knowledge from earlier in the book to build a dynamic, distributed OSGi application.
Web-related technologies are ubiquitous. Almost all organizations and many individuals have some form of web presence, whether via social networking sites, static HTML pages, simple one-tier web applications, medium-sized n-tiered architectures, or massive global behemoths. Developers of these types of systems are familiar with a number of key technologies, including web services for back-end communication between business tiers and web applications for user interaction via a browser.