JDBC Drivers in OSGi

How do you create a JDBC connection for a given JDBC URL in an OSGi application? In particular, how do you avoid an explicit dependency of your application code on a given driver?

In a plain old classpath context, you would invoke DriverManager.getConnection(), maybe after loading the driver class using Class.forName(), if your driver does not support the Service Provider mechanism which is mandatory for JDBC 4.0.

The trouble is, even if your driver does provide the META-INF/services metadata, this does not work in OSGi, since DriverManager creates a number of class loader problems by using Class.forName() internally.

I'm working with a variant of the Zentus driver for SQLite, which I've modified slightly to build an OSGi bundle under Java 1.6. I added the service metadata, and indeed my application code now works without loading the driver via Class.forName() - as long as the code is running outside of OSGi.

There are the following issues:

1. The context class loader of the current thread is used to scan for META-INF/services resources and to load the referenced classes. This happens during initialization of DriverManager, so it will not catch resources from bundles which are not visible to the current context.
   


2. Additional drivers can register with DriverManager, they should do so in static initalization code, so that the driver gets registered when someone calls Class.forName("my.own.Driver").


3. DriverManager.getConnection() iterates over the registered drivers until it finds one that can process the given URL. Unfortunately, it does a fatal double check to see if the class of that driver is the same that would be obtained by the caller. This amounts to calling Class.forName("some.matching.Driver", ccl) where ccl is the caller's class loader.

(To get some information on what is happening, it is useful to call DriverManager.setLogStream(System.out).)

The third point means that DriverManager.getConnection() will always fail if the driver class is not visible to your bundle, so there really is no way to avoid a dependency.

Here is an outline of a partial solution:

• Create an OSGi bundle for each JDBC driver you want to use. Add a bundle activator that calls Class.forName("some.jdbc.Driver"). This will register the driver with DriverManager when the bundle is started.
• For each bundle that needs to create connections using DriverManager.getConnection(), add optional dependencies on the JDBC drivers packages for all drivers that you are planning to use.

This is rather ugly, because you need to edit your client bundle manifest whenever you want to add support for an additional driver. But at least you can deploy your system with any subset of the defined drivers, maybe with just a single driver.

If you do not need to support legacy code, do not bother using DriverManager and the Service Provider mechanism. After all, this is just a poor man's service registry, and you are much better off using the OSGi Service Registry.

I'll give an example in one of my next posts.