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  1. cristina tabacaru

    Apache Felix and Google Android

     

                                                                                                                          

    Introduction

    The purpose of this document is to explain how to use Apache Felix on Google's new mobile phone platform - Android

     

    Dalvik VM

    Google Android SDK allows developers to write Java code in order to create Android applications. Instead of a regular Java Virtual Machine that executes this code, a special-purpose virtual machine named Dalvik is being used in order to comply with mobile platform requirements. Dalvik does not use Java bytecode format, but, a tool named dx, included in the Android SDK, transforms the Java class files of Java classes compiled by a regular Java compiler into another class file format (the .dex format) (the conversion is not done at runtime).

     

    Preparing bundles

    Although latest version of Felix, 1.0.3, has now built in support for Android, there are still some things needed to be done in order to successfully make use of it ( you will need to install Android SDK and you should have <android_SDK_HOME>/tools added to system PATH variable). The zip file available for download has been created in the same manner.

            1. Each JAR file you use, either as a Felix library or as a bundle, should contain its DEX equivalent:
     

    a)     create DEX file for your JAR

    dx --dex --output=classes.dex JAR_file.jar

     

    b)     add DEX file into the JAR

    aapt add JAR_file.jar classes.dex

    2. The processed JARs should be made available to Android by transferring them to the emulator:

    emulator &
adb push JAR_file.jar path_emulator/JAR_file.jar

     

    3. Referring to the sample project, these are the steps we followed:

    osgi-android: /

\- bin

\- bundle

\- conf

\- felix.sh

    a)     prepare felix JAR

    export PATH=<path-to-android>/tools:$PATH
cd bin
dx --dex --output=classes.dex felix.jar
aapt add felix.jar classes.dex

     

    b)     prepare bundle JARS

    cd bundle
dx --dex --output=classes.dex org.apache.felix.shell-1.0.0.jar
aapt add org.apache.felix.shell-1.0.0.jar classes.dex
dx --dex --output=classes.dex org.apache.felix.shell.tui-1.0.0.jar
aapt add org.apache.felix.shell.tui-1.0.0.jar classes.dex
dx --dex --output=classes.dex EnglishDictionary.jar
aapt add EnglishDictionary.jar classes.dex
dx --dex --output=classes.dex FrenchDictionary.jar
aapt add FrenchDictionary.jar classes.dex
dx --dex --output=classes.dex SpellChecker.jar
aapt add SpellChecker.jar classes.dex

     

    c)     transfer them all to the emulator (Please note that you need some kind of unix-ish shell (Mac OS X works fine, linux should too) or translate the instructions to your own platform.)

    cd osgi-android
emulator &
find * -type f -exec adb push {} /root/felix/{} \;

     

    Launching Felix

    Once you've done that, you should be able to launch Felix and referred bundles on Android: start emulator shell, change directory to the location of your Felix files and execute felix.sh.

    adb shell
cd /root/felix
sh felix.sh

    felix.sh contains a unix command that launches Felix main class using the actual runtime of the emulator.

    /system/bin/dalvikvm -Xbootclasspath:/system/framework/core.jar \
  -classpath bin/felix.jar org.apache.felix.main.Main

    If all went well, you should see the Felix command line shell now. Type "help" for further instructions.

    You may now install and launch EnglishDictionary , FrenchDictionary and SpellChecker bundles to test how Felix is working. These are all examples from the Apache Felix OSGI tutorial and correspond to Apache Felix Tutorial Example 2, Apache Felix Tutorial Example 2b and Apache Felix Tutorial Example 5 respectively.

    • EnglishDictionary - supplies a Dictionary service implementation with the following collection of words "welcome", "to", "the", "osgi", "tutorial"
    • FrenchDictionary - supplies a Dictionary service implementation with the following collection of words "bienvenue", "au", "tutoriel", "osgi"
    • SpellChecker - supplies a spell checker that retrieves the first Dictionary implementation it finds and checks if the word you've entered is in the dictionary or not.
    start file:bundle/EnglishDictionary.jar
start file:bundle/FrenchDictionary.jar
start file:bundle/SpellChecker.jar

     

    Embedding Felix

    Apache Felix can also be integrated with an Android application.
    To achieve this, you need to embed Felix into onCreate() method of your Activity class (see Android docs for more details on how to use an Activity) and process your bundles as shown above.

     

    Download

    The project zip file osgi-android.zip