… or how to use Ceylon inside Java EE application servers.
The Ceylon language is inherently modular, and is shipped with a complete infrastructure that allows leveraging this modularity out-of-the box. However Ceylon is not captive of its own infrastructure. After the Java and JS interoperability efforts, the 1.1.0 version has brought out-of-the-box compatibility with OSGI, which enables running Ceylon code inside many other containers.
Every module archive produced by the Ceylon compiler contains OSGI headers in its MANIFEST file, that describe the module as it should seen by OSGI containers.
Containers tested so far are:
- Apache Felix 4.4.1,
- Oracle Glassfish v4.1,
- Equinox platform,
- JBoss WildFly 8.0.0.alpha3 (with JBossOSGi installed)
Of course, the Ceylon distribution and SDK modules should first be added inside the OSGI container as OSGI bundles.
But instead of writing long explanations here, let me direct you to some concrete examples provided, with the required instructions, in the following repository: https://github.com/davidfestal/Ceylon-Osgi-Examples/
For the moment, it contains a single example that, though very simple, will give you the main steps to start. It also shows the use of a Ceylon module totally outside Ceylon’s standard infrastructure, even outside the JBoss world, in a Web application servlet running on a Glassfish v4.1 application server. But of course you should be able to run it inside other OSGI-enabled application servers or containers.
In the next examples we’ll try to go further an do more interesting things such as providing services, using Ceylon annotations (which are compatible with Java annotations), or using OSGI services.
Please report any problem you might encounter while testing, and feel free to submit pull requests for any other successful use cases you might have built.
Looking forward for your remarks, and for the time to write the following examples.
| Reference: | Write in Ceylon, Deploy as OSGI, use in JEE from our JCG partner David Festal at the Ceylon Team blog blog. |
