Automated generating of OSGi component versions

Software components can be found in both enterprise-wide and mobile/embedded solutions. Compo-nents are mutually linked and dependent, but encapsulated as black boxes and developed independently. They can be replaced without affecting the rest of the application. This advantage requires careful and complex compatibility checks between both component versions though, otherwise the whole applica-tion can be broken down. In present systems, versioning is often used as an instrument representing changes during software development. In this paper we discuss the versioning scheme of the OSGi Release 4 component model and propose an automated generation of component version identifiers. The mechanism is based on an automatic analysis of changes in components ’ interfaces which ensures safety of OSGi component upgrades. 1