OSGI: static and dynamic references

OSGI as component model is one of the cores of AEM, as it allows to dynamically register and consume services offered by other parts of the system. It’s the central registry you can ask for all kind of services.

If you have some weeks of CQ experience as developer, you probably already know the mechanics how to access a product service. For example one of the most often used statements in a service (or component) is:

@Reference
 SlingRepository repo;

which gives you access to the SlingRepository service, through which you can reach the JCR. Technically spoken, you build a static reference. So your service gets active only when this reference can be resolved. By this you can rely on the repository being available whenever your service is running. This is a constraint which is not a problem in many cases. Because it wouldn’t make sense for your service to run without the repository, and it also frees to permanently checking “repo” for being not null 🙂

Sometimes you don’t want to wait for a reference to be resolved (maybe breaking a dependency loop) or you can just deliver additional value if a certain (optional) service is available. In such cases you can make it a dynamic reference

@Reference(policy=ReferencePolicy.DYNAMIC)
SlingRepository repo;

Now there’s no hard dependency to the SlingRepository service; so your service might get active before the SlingRepository service is available, and therefor you need to handle the case that “repo” is null.

Per se this feature might have little importance to you, but combining it with other aspects makes it really powerful. More on that in the next post…