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OSGi DevCon 2012 BOF Review

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for the OSGi BOF at OSGi DevCon 2012 both in person and via the live video feed.

The meeting was well attended and we had a packed agenda with presentations and an OSGi quiz. Details of the event along with slides and video recordings are available below.

Thanks to the support of Manning Books and Pearson/Prentice Hall we were able to offer those who attended the chance to win an OSGi Book in a prize draw. The winners of the book prize draw were:

Denis Carey Jan Fetyko Beyhan Veliev
Tim Diekmann Carsten Ziegeler

The meeting started with an introduction from the OSGi Alliance President, Richard Nicholson thanking EclipseCon for hosting the OSGi DevCon and the BOF. Richard also welcomed all of the OSGi Users' Forum DC Metro members who had joined for the meeting.

Neil Bartlett (Paremus) started the BOF presentations off with a talk about Java 8 Modules, Jigsaw and OSGi.

Abstract:
The idea of integrating a module system into the core Java runtime has been proposed and discussed for many years, and in Java SE 8 it may finally be happening. How will this affect OSGi developers and users? This talk will describe the main differences between OSGi and Jigsaw, the prototype OpenJDK module system. Pros and cons of each in different environments will be discussed. Finally, opportunities and challenges for interoperability: from the perspective of both application developers (who may need to integrate modules from both kinds) and from library module developers (who may need to target both module systems).

Next up was Tom Watson (IBM) with a presentation on Subsystems: For those occasions where bundles are just too small...

Abstract:
Enterprise OSGi 4.2 standardized the use of a number of component models for developing Enterprise OSGi applications: Servlet, JSP, Blueprint, and JPA. Implementations of these specifications have since become available in many open source projects and products such as Apache Aries, Eclipse Gemini/Virgo, GlassFish, JBoss Application Server and WebSphere Application Server. Looking at a number of these environments, it's clear that when it comes to assembly and deployment there's still something missing, namely something to represent a collection of bundles (e.g. an Application). Eclipse Virgo has "PARs" and "Plans", Apache Aries has "Applications", and WebSphere Application Server has “Applications” and “Composites”. Looking further afield to kernel projects, other bundle collection concepts exist, such as Apache Karaf "Features". Each model has concepts in common, such as identity, versioning and content, but also differences like isolation and format. It is clear that this is an area of Enterprise OSGi that could benefit from standardization and hence the Subsystems specification is being created for the Enterprise OSGi 5.0 specification.

Subsystems is an OSGi specification which standardizes artifacts representing collections of bundles, such as an Application. This presentation will introduce the Subsystems design. It will describe how Subsystems can be used for development and deployment of bundle collections with different isolation semantics, to address the application, composite and feature use cases seen in the OSGi community today. The OSGi framework provides a powerful runtime for the Java platform, which promotes strong modularity, versioning and dynamic management of bundles. Bundles installed in the framework are expected to collaborate and live together sharing the same service registry and public class space. Until now there was no standard way to provide additional isolation and lifecycle to a collection of bundles installed in a single framework. This presentation will discuss how the subsystems specification can be used to provide additional isolation to a collection of bundles or applications installed into the framework.

Peter Kriens, then addressed one of the new features of the upcoming OSGi Release 5 specifications in his talk about How to simplify OSGi development using OBR.

Abstract:
The OSGi Alliance has been working on the OBR specification to describe resources in terms of requirements and capabilities. This talk will explore how this generic model can be applied to OSGi development to significantly simplify and improve the development, build, release and deployment processes. The talk will include a look at practical use cases, a demo or two (time permitting) and insight into the sort of capabilities you could build into your systems in the future.

The BOF finished with an amusing look back over Peter Kriens time at the OSGi Alliance since its inception 2002. This was delivered as an OSGi Quiz asking a series of questions, each with a numerical answer and an interesting anecdote from Peter. The winner of the competition was Jeff McAffer, although we suspect it wasn’t down to his intimate knowledge of the OSGi Alliance history, rather his knowledge of Peter’s love for The Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy!

Thanks to everyone who attended, our speakers for their time and effort in preparing and providing the presentations, Manning and Pearson/Prentice Hall for the draw prizes and of course EclipseCon for hosting us.

OSGi DevCon 2012 Program Committee


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