org.osgi.service.coordinator

The OSGi programming model is based on the collaboration of standard and custom components. In such a model there is no central authority that has global knowledge of the complete application. Though this lack of authority can significantly increase reusability (and robustness) there are times when the activities of the collaborating bundles must be coordinated. For example, a service that is repeatedly called in a task could optimize performance by caching intermediate results until it knew the task was actually ended.

To know when a task involving multiple collaborators has ended is the primary purpose of the Coordinator service specification. The Coordinator service provides a rendezvous for a requestor to create a Coordination that is then associated with the current thread. When the request finished, the Coordination is terminated. Through the Coordinator service anybody being called on the thread can find the current Coordination, similar to how transactions are governed.

For example let’s assume a service is called that sets some information for the current user. Since the API is designed to take element by element, it is generally called a number of times in a web request. Going to the database for each request can be expensive. The service can therefore delay the processing until all requests have been received. To implement this, the service checks