Jahia and OSGi

Written by The Jahia Team

Jahia uses OSGi to package and distribute Jahia modules. This means that you can now dynamically deploy and undeploy modules into a Jahia installation, making it easier to manage modules during both development and production phases.

How is it better?

In the following table we show the main differences in traditional extensions development in non-OSGi (competing) systems and Jahia OSGi platform.

	Non OSGi platforms	Jahia (with OSGi)
Class or library deployment	Requires web app restart	No restart needed
Module is "exploded" on deployment
Quick changes to source files don't require deployment	Only works in exploded directory, not module's source
External libraries are deployed into WEB-INF/lib and exposed to all other modules
Undeployment cleans up everything immediately
Modules depending on others cannot be deployed without their dependency
Modules started/stopped after installation

For administrators:

Modules can be fully undeployed at run-time (including module libraries)
No writing inside web application /modules directory at deployment
Deploy directly modules from public or private stores
Tools for module administration & debugging
Only declared resources are web accessible (closed by default)
And more…

For developers:

Undeploy and redeploy any module code changes without restarting Jahia server
Deploy-free Coding for JSPs, static files (CSS, Javascript, images, ...) loads updates directly from module source code!
Embed your own versions of libraries if the ones bundled with Jahia don’t fit your needs
Expose new services or use services registered by other modules
New tools to help with OSGi development
And a lot more!