Apache ACE Target Template for OpenMUC

This project provides a target template for using OpenMUC with the software distribution framework Apache ACE. Putting together the power of OpenMUC for monitoring and control systems with the possibility to distribute software (updates) to a large number of on-premise clients allows scenarios like:

• Individual test setups for both, developers and software testers
• Initial provisioning of new OpenMUC installations, even directly on customer premises
• Centralized deployment of software updates without restart of the client systems (hot deployment)
• Centralized management of deployed features individually for each customer

The template currently uses Apache ACE 2.1.0. General information about ACE can be found in the ACE user guide.

Licenses

The files of this project have different sources and are protected by different licenses:

• The run-openmuc.sh file as well as all files in the /conf directory come from the OpenMUC project and are licensed under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3.0
• The ACE agent library com.apache.ace.agent.jar comes from the Apache ACE project and is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0
• The Apache Felix OSGi framework comes from the Apache Felix project and is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0

All other work of this project including the documentation is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.

Configuration

The configuration of the ACE agent bundle can be set inside the config.properties file. This template includes the most common parameters preconfigured in the file. If any value is set, it's the default value. For a more detailed description of the parameters see the ACE user guide. To start, at least the following both parameters must be set:

agent.identification.agentid=openmuc-1
agent.discovery.serverurls=http://localhost:8080

Theagentid parameter sets the identification of the target. It must be unique for each ACE server instance. The serverurls parameter defines one or more urls of the central ACE servers.

Deployment

Bundles deployed to the target will be stored in the cache directory of the OSGi framework (felix-cache by default). The default setting of Felix in OpenMUC clears the cache on startup of the framework and installs and starts all bundles from the /bundles folder afterwards. This behavior deletes all centrally deployed bundles. To prevent the cache from being flushed, the following setting in the config.properties file must be set:

org.osgi.framework.storage.clean=none

Known limitations

Out of the box, ACE can only handle OSGi bundles and .cfg configuration files. It's not possible to distribute other artifacts like the channels.xml file. Adding support for new types of artifacts is possible, more details can be found in the documentation. Because of this, an empty channels.xml file is part of this template. If not provided to the OpenMUC framework, an error occurs.