Fairly everything in e(fx)clipse is done with DS-Services when you run in an OSGi-Environment.
Still many of them don’t have any dependency on OSGi at all so most components we have can also run/get used in an ordinary Java-Environment (see the blog post about the code editor framework as an example). Since the beginning we published some of them through the ServiceLoader-API (and we’ll still keep it for those) but that has the draw back that you can not express relations between services.
Tonight I had a crazy idea: Could I read the DS-Component-Registration files in an none-OSGi environment and wire services together without using the ServiceLoader-API.
The result is JavaDSServiceProcessor. Our public service lookup API has been retrovited to use this internal service instead of ServiceLoader so if one now eg looks up our AdapterService like this:
import org.eclipse.fx.core.Util;
import org.eclipse.fx.core.adapter.AdapterService;
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) {
AdapterService adapterService = Util.getService(AdapterService.class).get();
}
}
will get a fully configured AdapterService. We currently don’t support everything from the DS-Spec (eg Properties are not yet support) but I’ll fill this gap soon.
Tomsondev Blog 
Hi Tom. Another approach to using OSGi services (service reg) and DS and other extensions (e.g. remote services) in java is to use Apache Connect. Connect was formerly known as PojoSR and implements the OSGi service registry without the Bundle layer. I’ve added on a ServiceRegistry API accessed via ServiceLoader in this project:
https://github.com/ECF/ServiceRegistry
As you can see from our examples, this allows the use of DS, Remote Services and/or other Service Registry extensions.
There is talk in the EEG of standardizing Apache Connect, but so far it seems to be talk.
Thanks for point me to PojoSR I knew about that but could not remember its name. My scope although is much smaller I just want to get DS services working. Maybe I should add support for that as well to our service lookup.
FWIW: It’s easy to add an scr impl (equinox or apache felix scr) to the set of initial bundles. This is already done by this project:
https://github.com/ECF/ServiceRegistry/tree/master/projects/org.eclipse.ecf.osgi.serviceregistry.remoteservices
And then your Java-only would/get all of SCR. None of the examples in this repo use it yet, but it does get resolved and started.
One can also remove the ECF remote services…or other bundles if not needed. For obvious reasons, I’ve been focused on using Pojosr/Apache Connect for remote services examples and use cases.
This blog post made my day.
The ECF approach is interessting, but for now I’ll go with Tom’s solution as it has no boilerplate code on client side.
Not sure what you mean by boilerplate code. The remote service examples in this repo are intentionally not using DS, but if you add either equinox or apache felix SCR implementation bundle you can have full-spec-compliant DS (all running java-only/no OSGi bundle layer)
The remote services need some setup to run, whereas the AdapterService just has above two lines on client side. This seemed suitable to me for a quick solution. However in the long run SCR are the way to go.
Hi Ben.
The examples that I provide do have some code to export remote services, but this is by choice…done to show the use of java code to explicitly export remote services. For these examples, I intentionally left out the SCR bundle. With SCR, there is no setup code needed, as remote services are registered and exported via SCR and the service registry.
But if remote services aren’t to be used at all, the only code needed to access the service registry is:
ServiceRegistry serviceRegistry = ServiceLoader.load(ServiceRegistryFactory.class)
.iterator().next().newServiceRegistry(null);
Everything else in
https://github.com/ECF/ServiceRegistry/blob/master/projects/examples/mycorp.examples.timeservice.sr.host/src/mycorp/examples/timeservice/sr/host/Main.java
is either code to enable remote services debugging or the TimeService registration, which when SCR is present is done via SCR instead.