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Cloud Workshop
During EclipseCon we held an OSGi cloud workshop that was very well attended; we started with over 30 people. The goal of the workshop was to find out what role OSGi could play in the cloud. Obviously OSGi is very well suited for remote deployment, a characteristic that seems extremely applicable for cloud applications. The day started with an introduction, several companies like Paremus, Rackspace, SAP, VMWare, and TIBCO gave a short presentation or overview. We then split up into discussion groups until lunch to discuss the topics that are relevant on the boundary of clouds and OSGi.
After lunch we reconvened and created a shared list of topics and merged as many as possible to get to a number of these topics:
- Provisioning/Configuration
- OSGi Cloud View Management
- Env. Awareness/SLA/Resource Mgmt
- Efficiency / Data Affinity
- Post Mortem/Debugging
- Discovery
- Migration/Forking
- Isolation/Application Model
These topics were then divided and discussed in smaller groups to find the requirements. After the tea break we discussed the requirements and how to make progress. Along the way we lost a few people to the ongoing conference but the list of requirements was still quite long. There was even sufficient energy in the room to a subgroup to work further on the discovered requirements. The workshop leader (Peter Kriens) will create an OSGi mailing list for this workgroup where this report will be discussed. It seems very likely that there will be enough member companies available to start a Cloud Expert Group.
This was a very successful day that might turn out to have some great followups. If you're interested in participating (not just observing what others are doing) in the subgroup, please contact Peter Kriens.
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Recent OSGi Alliance News
OSGi DevCon
The OSGi DevCon that took place in Santa Clara last month was, as usual, a great success. Though there are no breakdown numbers yet of how the sessions were attended, it was clear that OSGi DevCon was a major presence on EclipseCon. All OSGi sessions I visited were quite well attended. And though all the sessions I saw were good to very good, the fact that you can meet so many OSGi people in the hallways is excellent. It was hard to find any quiet time at the conference, there were always people around to discuss with.
On Monday we held our Birds of a Feather. This was a well attended event where Jason van Zyl held a short talk about what Sonatype is doing with Nexus and Maven. Tim Diekmann (TIBCO), the co-chair of the Enterprise Expert Group, held an informative presentation about the to be released Enterprise Specification v4.2. After this, the remainder of the BOF turned informal, greatly helped by the drinks and snacks that were handed out.
OSGi evangelist, Peter Kriens
OSGi DevCon Came to London
February this year saw the popular OSGi DevCon series of conferences reach London. The full, extended day (9am to 10pm!) conference was co-hosted with JAX London. The quality of presentations and content was, as usual for OSGi DevCon’s, very high and there was an impressive delegate turnout for the OSGi related tracks. Some of the highlights included the Keynote from Kirk Knoernschild from Burton Group on OSGi in the Enterprise: Agility, Modularity and Architecture’s Paradox, the Introduction to OSGi Tutorial from Neil Bartlett and the OSGi Development Tooling Panel. For those that managed to stay the duration there was an overview of the latest OSGi Enterprise specifications by David Bosschaert, followed by an overview of Apache Aries by Ian Robinson and Eclipse Gemini from Mike Keith. Feedback we have received has been very good and we thank everyone who attended, and of course the presenters, for their support.
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Expert Group Updates and Latest Happenings
EEG
You may have heard the news or seen the announcement at the OSGi BoF at EclipseCon last week already. The EEG has published its first release of the Enterprise Specification. This is the result of more than three years of intense discussions and very productive collaboration.
The EEG was founded late 2006 after it was determined that there is enough interest in the enterprise community to use OSGi. The first use cases were driven by the desire to make OSGi more attractive to J2EE application developers. For this, we started to identify the most common and important technologies out of the more than 20 different J2EE specifications and worked out an optimal way to integrate them with OSGi. The idea was to allow existing applications to run inside an OSGi framework with minimal changes while at the same time defining new services to integrate the J2EE functionality with the proven OSGi programming model.
This first release is an important milestone, but not the finish. In the coming months the EEG is working on important concepts that were frequently reported as missing in OSGi by the enterprise community and OSGi users. Among those concepts is the grouping of bundles and services into something that is often called an Application. There are various specifications in CPEG as well as the EEG addressing this and they will need to be aligned closely.
In addition, there will be enhancements to some of the specifications that are part of the first release. For example, the Blueprint, Configuration Admin, and web container specifications will see updates to address use cases that did not make it into the first version.
The co-chairs would like to take this opportunity to thank the EEG and CPEG members for their valuable contributions and making this release happen in time for EclipseCon 2010.
Stay tuned.
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REG
Standards Coordination Meeting for CPEs
On January 19 and 20 Deutsche Telekom organized a standards coordination meeting for software modularity on Customer Premise Equipments (CPE) in Berlin. Major standardization organizations focusing on the broadband/residential space participated, incl. the Home Gateway Initiative, the Broadband Forum, the UPnP Device Management Working Committee and the OSGi Residential Expert Group. All organizations agree that software modularity for CPEs is required and plan to collaborate on future standardization activities. OSGi is in a good position to become the standard for software modularity in CPEs.
New Timeline
The standardization efforts of the OSGi Residential Expert Group focus mainly on the remote management of OSGi enabled home gateways. To ensure the consistency with other relevant standardization activities, REG has to delay the release of its specifications until September 2010.
Growing participation in REG:
There is an increasing interest to participate in the Residential Expert Group by OSGi members, but also by non-members. This interest already has resulted in the new OSGi memberships from Alcatel-Lucent and 2Wire who both joined the Alliance to actively participate in the ongoing standardization efforts.
REG Bundlefest in June
The Residential Expert Group is planning to have a Bundlefest in the week of June 7 in Montpellier. The aim of the Bundlefest is to finish the reference implementations and test cases as well as to coordinate the writing of the REG specifications.
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Marketing Committee
There are a lot of activities happening that will enable the OSGi Alliance to better position and promote itself and its technology. In addition to PR activities we already had two successful events taking place, OSGi DevCon@London, and OSGiDevCon@EclipseCon. We also want to crown our success with an OSGi Community Event in 2010. It will provide you with the opportunity to network and stay informed about adoption and technology development based on OSGi in your industries. Please stay tuned for more information coming soon!
Based on the decisions at board level the marketing committee is also working on a refresh of the website look & feel as well as its content. It will include new information on the position of the OSGi Alliance, its technology adoption in various industries and the new membership tiers. Later in the year the MC also wants to foster the positioning of the OSGi Alliance and its technology via webinars. There is still the opportunity to influence this content, if you get involved now.
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OSGi Technology in the News
For a complete listing of the latest news please visit www.osgi.org
Do We Really Need OSGi?
Ovum, April 1, 2010
Enterprise OSGi spec rolls out at EclipseCon
SearchSOA, March 25, 2010
Enterprise OSGi uptake tops EclipseCon
SD Times, March 24, 2010
OSGi Enterprise Spec 4.2 Released
InfoQ, March 23, 2010
James Gosling isn’t going anywhere
JavaWorld, March 17, 2010
OSGi DevCon 2010 at EclipseCon Offers Four-Day Program for Developers, Decision-Makers
March 10, 2010
IBM and Eclipse efforts focus on OSGi modularity
InfoWorld, March, 4, 2010
OSGi plugs along
JavaWorld, March 3, 2010
OSGi DevCon London
InfoQ, March 3, 2010
NetBeans 6.9 M1: OSGi Support, JDK 6 Required
JavaLobby, Feb. 17, 2010
SpringSource Offers dm Server to Eclipse
ADT, Jan. 13, 2010
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