Overview

The Pax Reflector is a application inspection tool, which can look into your running application without any special debugger. Although Pax Reflector can quite easily be used in any application, its use in OSGi environments make it even more powerful as it can be installed after the start of the main application and yet do the inspection. This could be very important when a faulty condition has occured and one need to take a closer look but can't restart the application with the debugger interface enabled.

Other resources

Pax Reflector - Details — Details about how to use Pax Reflector.

Maven site — Maven generated documentation
User Guide — How to use Pax Reflector

Issue tracker

Issues, bugs, and feature requests can be submitted to the issue tracking system.

Usage

System requirements (for OSGi deployment)

any OSGI R4 compilant framework
Pax Web
Pax Web Extender

Manual installation (under OSGi)

Download the latest version from http://repository.ops4j.org/maven2/org/ops4j/pax/reflector/:
- pax-reflector-service
- pax-reflector-servlet
- pax-reflector-typehandlers
- pax-reflector-html
Deploy the downloaded bundle to your preferred OSGi framework

Pax Runner installation

pax-run --profiles=web \
mvn:org.ops4j.pax.reflector/pax-reflector-service \
mvn:org.ops4j.pax.reflector/pax-reflector-servlet \
mvn:org.ops4j.pax.reflector/pax-reflector-types \
mvn:org.ops4j.pax.reflector/pax-reflector-html \
mvn:org.ops4j.pax.web-extender/pax-web-ex-whiteboard

Non OSGi deployment

User guide (see resources) provides details about how to deploy Pax Reflector in non OSGi environments.

Source code

https://scm.ops4j.org/repos/ops4j/projects/pax/reflector ( or browse via FishEye )
This project builds with Apache Maven and uses Apache Felix's maven-bundle-plugin, and Peter Krien's bnd tool.

Latest News

Pax Reflector Progress

Pax Reflector reached a point where it is almost useful. It consists of 4 bundles (plan to create a uber-bundle later).

If you deploy those (pax-reflector-service, pax-reflector-servlet, pax-reflector-types, pax-reflector-html) together with Pax Web and Pax Web Extender - Whiteboard, then you have a html view into your running OSGi system.

You can also register additional Root Objects, to get a more direct line into the application.

The various "expose" attributes are not implemented yet, and future will bring a more attractive view.