Eclipse Communication Framework

ECF is a set of APIs/frameworks/types for inter-process communication

Current version: 3.15.5 Release Date: 1/20/2025

Install into Bndtools for Remote Services development

NEW: Feature for Remote Services tooling that enhances Bndtools 7.1 or higher. Theses tools use bndtools project, workspace, service templates, and OSGi services wizards for simplifying the creation of OSGi remote services. Also present are Eclipse view for debugging remote service endpoint description discovery and remote service export/import. The feature requires that Bndtools 7.1+ be installed into a recent version of Eclipse. Also see the Install into Bndtools 7.1 via Oomph section below for automated install.

Name: ECF 3.15.5

Update Site URL: https://download.eclipse.org/rt/ecf/latest/site.p2

Update Site as Zip: org.eclipse.ecf.sdk_3.15.5.v20250124-1843.zip

Javadocs

Install into Bndtools 7.1 via Oomph

There are now Oomph Setups that will automatically install and configure Eclipse, Bndtools 7.1 and ECF 3.15.5 see here

Features for Bndtools-based OSGi Remote Services Development

Workspace, Project, and Bndrun Templates

Bndtools Workspace Template for Remote Services Development here: https://github.com/ECF/bndtools.workspace. This workspace template contains multiple project templates for creating Remote Service API, Impl, and Consumer projects via the New->Bnd OSGi Project wizard:

Wizards for creating api, impl, consumer Remote Services projects via a single wizard

Eclipse Views for Endpoint Discovery and Remote Service Admin Manager

Wizard and Template-Created Bndrun files, to immediately run/debug wizard-generated remote services

Download/Install into Apache Karaf 4.4+

For Install into Karaf runtime, here is a top-level Karaf Features file

Key ECF APIs

OSGi Remote Services

ECF provides a fully-compliant and multi-provider implementation of the OSGi Remote Services and Remote Services Admin/RSA. A number of providers are available in this repo, but there are also many providers available at the ECF github organization.

ECF is the OSGi R8 RS/RSA implementation in the OSGi Test Compatibilty Kit (TCK)

Eclipse Install/Update File Transfer

ECF filetransfer is used by the Eclipse IDE

ECF Github Organization

ECF has an organization with a number of other repos containing Remote Services distribution and discovery providers (e.g. grpc, etcd discovery, hazelcast, JMS, JGroups, xmlrpc-based distribution providers, examples, others). Most of these repos provide distribution or discovery providers that depend upon the core remote services/RSA implementation provided by this repo.

Wiki

See the ECF Wiki for examples, tutorials, Karaf install documentation, other documentation.

To contribute or find out what's going on right now, please join the ecf-dev mailing list or contact project lead Scott Lewis at github email: scottslewis at gmail.com

Services, Training, and Support

For Remote Services training, support, or custom OSGi or Eclipse development please contact scottslewis at gmail.com via email or post on the ecf-dev mailing list

Contributing to ECF

Contributions are always welcome! For 20 years ECF has been innovating via community contributions. See CONTRIBUTING.md