SpringSource manifest headers registered with OSGi
The OSGi Alliance has decided to accommodate vendor-specific manifest headers by listing them in a public registry. The aim is to avoid clashes between vendors and between vendors and OSGi's own headers.
The registry currently contains OSGi's own headers, those introduced by SpringSource dm Server, and two used by the bnd tool.
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josef betancourt says:
Added on November 27th, 2008 at 10:17 amApparently these will grow as other organizations and applications begin to use OSGi. Would it make sense to instead use simple name spaces? Like "spring:Web-ContextPath". Thus, companies can also reserve name spaces instead of just adding to the default. One exception to this is further complexity to the the manifest processing, perhaps.
Though they have raised many critiques in the XML world (especially on attributes), name spaces have been useful.
Just wondering.
Stuart McCulloch says:
Added on November 27th, 2008 at 11:17 amJosef, unfortunately you can't use ':' in manifest header names
from the Jar spec:
header: name : value
name: alphanum *headerchar
alphanum: {A-Z} | {a-z} | {0-9}
headerchar: alphanum | – | _
but I guess you could always use '-' in its place (say Spring-…)
Glyn Normington says:
Added on November 27th, 2008 at 12:00 pmYes, that would be possible and the OSGi Core Platform Expert Group did consider it, but registration of 'undecorated' headers was preferred. The sort of issue you get into is that SpringSource would probably be given "SpringSource-" as a prefix and then users would make mistakes like spelling it "Spring-Source-".
Only time will tell whether this decision was a good one, but the undecorated header names seem more usable at the moment.
Alin Dreghiciu says:
Added on November 27th, 2008 at 4:40 pmI would have voted for the decorated ones. The fact that people make mistakes on a header name could happen very easy on any kind of name (e.g. easy to say Web-FilterMapping instead of Web-FilterMappings).
But if we would had the decorated ones it will at least:
* people do not think that those headers are standard OSGi headers and expect them to work "all over the place", e.g. Import-Bundle will only work on SpringSource DM Server and they can be taken as standard headers by people
* people could easy find by the prefix a hint where to look for that header
But I guess this discussion should be on the OSGi Alliance list not here