11.5. Summary

You need to manage your applications to keep them running correctly and efficiently. Among other tasks, you need to deal with the update of infrastructure bundles and the monitoring and automatic removal of misbehaving applications.

OSGi allows you to organize the bundles into layers and manage the activation of each layer sequentially. This is done using the OSGi Start-Level service. It’s good practice to define at least four layers in an application framework implementation, where the topmost layer contains the user’s application. By setting the initial active start level of the OSGi framework to be lower than that of the application layer, a management agent can implement a safe-boot mode. This is useful when application bundles are misbehaving.