ECF Connection Creation and Management

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ECF's core API provides support for connection management...i.e. connection creation, connect, disconnect, entry point access to protocol-specific capabilities, platform-wide connection management, etc.

In ECF, connections are represented as implementations of the IContainer interface.

Connection creation

IContainer instances are created via instances of IConnectionFactory.

IConnectionFactory instances can be accessed as an OSGi service, or statically:

IContainerFactory factory = ContainerFactory.getDefault();


IContainerFactory factory = (IContainerFactory) factoryServiceTracker.getService();

where factoryServiceTracker is a ServiceTracker that has been setup to get the org.eclipse.ecf.core.IContainerFactory service. Once a factory is available, IContainer instances can then be created:

IContainer container = factory.createContainer("ecf.xmpp.smack");

There are a number of createContainer methods on the IContainerFactory, to support a variety of cases for creating/configuring IContainer instances.


Once an IContainer instance has be created, it may be used to first create a target ID (address), and then connect to it:

// Create targetID
ID targetID = IDFactory.getDefault().createID(container.getConnectNamespace(),"");
// Connect

If the connect call completes successfully, the container is then connected.

Container Adapters

Either before or after the connection, the client may wish to get an adapter from the IContainer in order to communicate in specific ways supported by the implementation.

IDatashareContainerAdapter datashare = (IDatashareContainerAdapter) container.getAdapter(IDatashareContainerAdapter.class);
if (datashare != null) { 
} else {
...this provider does not implement this adapter


ECF provider implementations are defined by two extension points:



The containerFactory extension point allows providers to define/setup their own container factory instances, and the namespace extension point allows providers to define their own namespaces (for defining ID types). See example usage on the extension point docs given above.

Container Listeners and Events

IContainers also expose an event notification API: IContainerListener.

container.addListener(new IContainerListener() {
    public void handleEvent(IContainerEvent event) {
        if (event instanceof IContainerConnectEvent) {
         ... do stuff upon connection

Existing Connection Management

There is a container manager OSGi service

IContainerManager containerManager = (IContainerManager) containerManagerServiceTracker.getService();

IContainer [] containers = containerManager.getAllContainers();
... use existing containers


Core API - bundle docs

Core API - test code]

ECF docs in Eclipse help