Yesterday we started to to replace our custom Http Bridge with the official Http Felix Bridge. I started implementing a ProxyFilter to dispatch all requests to the OSGi world if it can be handled by any OSGi registered service to make /opennms/topology work instead of using /opennms/osgi/topology. While finalizing this initial work, I encountered a problem that service properties supported by the PAX WEB project are not officially supported by OSGi and with that not supported by the Apache Felix HTTP project.

Looking at the OSGi Http Specification revealed, that the property should be called osgi.http.whiteboard.servlet.pattern instead.

That doesn’t sound too bad.

Simply replace all service properties alias with osgi.http.whiteboard.servlet.pattern, rebuild and let’s see the result, by verifying the Topology Map, as most of our OSGi servlet services are Vaadin Servlets.

But the Topology Map showed a 404.

Can’t things just simply work.

Debugging revealed, that the call is actually dispatched properly for the /opennms/topology request.

This is good, as it should be dispatched.

However, the OSGi world is determining that it cannot handle the request, thus resulting in a 404. Debugging the problem, showed that the osgi.http.whiteboard.servlet.pattern is behaving differntly than the alias key, as the name suggests.

So instead of /topology, the osgi.http.whiteboard.servlet.pattern should be /topology/* in order to handle Topology Map related calls properly.

In order to make this work properly, I had to also adjust the ProxyFilter to encounter for wildcards in the pattern. This also affected the Pax Vaadin components (we forked), but was simply to fix.

After some tweaks, it finally worked.

Okay kinda (-:

Beside this, all OSGi ReST requests were also working, such as /rest/classifications.

Yay, at least some progress \o/

It seems that somehow Vaadin is not working anymore. Trying other Vaadin UIs showed the same problem. But this is a story for another day.