nOSGi A POSIX-Compliant Native OSGi Framework

Ubiquitous computing aims at dynamically supporting users in everyday life with applications on mobile and embedded devices in the surroundings. Component frameworks, such as OSGi, ease the dynamic management of such application software. Yet, OSGi focuses on Java, while many mobile devices only support native languages with reasonable per-formance. Furthermore, Java may increase the costs for de-vices, and even small additional costs are a relevant factor for mass-market production. This paper presents nOSGi, the first native OSGi imple-mentation. Our C++ prototype implements the features of the OSGi R4 specification and runs without any modifi-cations on standard POSIX systems with support for ELF binaries. It provides the core functionality of the OSGi mod-ule, life cycle and service layer in a native C++ environ-ment. We measured considerable improvements of perfor-mance and memory consumption in comparison to common Java OSGi frameworks. Successful tests on various plat-forms, such as x86, x64, Sun SPARC and ARM demonstrate the portability of nOSGi