Welcome to Apache Felix

Welcome to the Apache Felix incubator homepage.

Apache Felix is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.

News

The Felix 0.8.0-incubator release is now available in the download section.

What is Felix?

Felix is a community effort to implement the OSGi R4 Service Platform, which includes the OSGi framework and standard services, as well as providing and supporting other interesting OSGi-related technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide a completely compliant implementation of the OSGi framework and standard services and to support a community around this technology. Felix currently implements a large portion of the OSGi release 4 specification, but additional work is necessary for full compliance. Despite this fact, the OSGi framework functionality provided by Felix is very stable.

OSGi technology originally targeted embedded devices and home services gateways, but it is ideally suited for any project that is interested in principles of modularity, component-oriented, and/or service-orientation. OSGi technology combines aspects of these aforementioned principles to define a dynamic service deployment framework that is amenable to remote management. As an example of a simple use case, Felix can be easily embedded into other projects and used as a plugin or dynamic extension mechanism; it serves this purpose much better than other systems that are used for similar purposes, such as Java Management Extensions (JMX).

What is OSGi?

The term OSGi generally refers to either the OSGi Alliance organization or the OSGi Service Platform technology. The OSGi Alliance is an independent corporation whose purpose is to define a specification to deliver services over wide-area networks to local-area networks and devices. The OSGi Alliance has numerous corporate and individual participants who are ultimately responsible for defining the features of the OSGi Service Platform. The OSGi Alliance releases a detailed specification describing the features and capabilities of its OSGi Service Platform, which can then be freely implemented by anyone. For more more information on OSGi or to retrieve the specification, refer to the OSGi Alliance web site.