New tutorial: Creating a RESTful Remote Service Provider

ECF's implementation of OSGi Remote Services supports the creation of custom distribution providers.  Why would anyone wish to do this, when they could simply reuse one of the existing providers?   Here are some good reasons:

Service Backward Compatibility:   There are cases where it's not a new service being developed, but rather a new facade for an existing (e.g. web) service.  With ECF, one can easily create a custom distribution provider that reuses the existing service to expose it as an OSGi service.  This allows existing services to continue to be exposed as they were originally written, but also be exposed as an OSGi Remote Service.

Custom Transport Requirements:  Remote services also frequently have specific transport requirements...for example using MQTT rather than HTTP, or using JSON rather than XML.  With ECF, distribution providers can completely control these transport-level decisions.

Standardization and Interoperability:  ECF fully implements both the OSGi Remote Services (RS) and Remote Service Admin (RSA) standards.   One thing this means is that all ECF Remote Service providers (both those created by us as well as others) are automatically compliant with the RS/RSA specifications.   Also, Remote Service providers can be proprietary/closed source or open source as desired.

We've created this tutorial to show how a custom RESTful (HTTP+JSON) remote service provider can be easily built:  Creating a RESTFul Remote Service Provider

New tutorial: OSGi Remote Services

ECF team has created a new introductory tutorial on creating standard OSGi Remote Services

Building your first OSGi Remote Service

Our plan is to create a number of such tutorials on OSGi Remote Services and focus on additional topics such as using/configuring alternative discovery or distribution providers, creating REST-based providers, asynchronous remote services and others.  They will generally first appear here.