OSGi
Technology Makes Headlines
OSGi Service Platform Helps Embedded Industry Answer Market Demand –
OSGi technology is shipping in millions of units worldwide and serves as the platform for universal middleware in embedded devices as well as server environments. The open standard helps companies to distinguish themselves from competitors by offering new capabilities and services first in fast-paced, technology-driven markets.
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Successful Deployments Show OSGi Technology Maturity
The OSGi Alliance invites its members to participate in one of six case studies presenting your companies’ successful deployments of OSGi technology in products, solutions and standard service offerings. The submission process makes it easy to participate.
The case studies will display how OSGi technology is proven and mature while highlighting your companies’ advantages in the marketplace. While the alliance plans six studies through the remainder of the year, accepting submissions on a rolling deadline, only the submissions completed by Nov. 1 will be included in a press release in November. Your company is encouraged to act now.
The alliance will write the studies and based on responses to the following criteria and a follow-up interview.
The highlighted case, or use, studies require a member product or solution that is on the market (GA). The key points that must be submitted to the alliance:
- Explain how the general OSGi technology benefits were specifically utilized in your product/service (e.g. hot pluggability);
- Product’s competitive position (e.g. industry leaders all use OSGi technology or your company is the first/only leader to use it or use it in this way);
- Explain why the market needs this product/solution and how your company selected OSGi technology to help deliver it;
- Provide primary contact at your company to liaison with alliance on PR/writing dialogue.
The writing and approval process from the date of submission for the case study follows:
- Acceptance notification within 5 days;
- Interview within 14 days;
- Draft for company review within 30 days;
- Approved by Marketing Committee and publishing within 60 days;
- Both the Marketing Committee and submitting company will be notified upon acceptance of draft date and end dates, based on the above timeline.
Please provide submissions or ask questions of Alisa Hicks from Global Inventures at ahicks@inventures.com or 775-720-5071.
Expert Group Updates and Latest Happenings
The Residential Expert Group organized a joint meeting with the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) and the UPnP Forum after the OSGi Community Event on June 11 in Berlin. The aim of this meeting was to share information about ongoing standardization activities and to discuss how these organizations can align their standardization activities to satisfy the requirements of convergent smart home solutions faster. In summary the visions of the organizations match, but there are differences in the details. REG will try to establish liasons with both organizations in order to further align future standardization activities.
_______________________ Since the last newsletter in February, the Enterprise Expert Group has come together for bi-monthly face to face meetings in San Jose, Southampton, and last in Dublin, and held monthly calls in between. The primary focus is now on completing RFC 119 Distributed OSGi and RFC 124 Component Model, with other RFPs and RFCs related to enterprise requirements on the OSGi core being transferred to CPEG.
The continuous work and discussions in the group have brought RFC 119 into a very good shape. The first prototype of the reference implementation was presented by IONA Technologies at the last community meeting in Berlin. The interest was very high and the open presentation spawned even more interest from groups outside of the OSGi Alliance.
There has been a long and controversial discussion around RFC 124 and its role as a component model for OSGi. The group has concluded that the integration of Spring and OSGi is positioned as only one of possibly many component models while the specification itself has no reference to the Spring framework.
The group is pleased to announce that versions of the current EEG RFC documents 119 and 124 will be made available to the public sometime this summer. This will allow a larger group of OSGi users and enthusiasts to comment and contribute to the specification before it is expected to be released as part of the next major version update of the OSGi specification.
Thanks to several members of the EEG the efforts to define integration points of JEE and OSGi have been revived. As this tasks is very comprehensive the initial steps will focus on the integration of web applications with more complex features to be addressed over time. _______________________
The Vehicle Expert Group held a Workshop on May 19 in Auburn Hills, hosted by Delphi. We had participants from the Connected Vehicle Trade Association, db4objects, General Motors, Johnson Controls. Michigan Department of Transportation, and Nissan. The aim of this meeting was to discuss the challenges (technical, economical, strategical, political) of using OSGi in the automotive industry and how the OSGi Alliance can help to resolve these issues. The main challenges that have been identified are as follows:
- Missing or insufficient Java and OSGi skills hinder the adoption in the automotive industry. OSGi User-Forums’ may be one way to resolve this issue.
- Additional upfront costs for HW/SW are a problem. Purchasers don’t understand the economical advantages of using OSGi. We need to make them understand that using OSGi for in-vehicle systems has to be long term strategic decision that will reduce development, integration, and maintenance costs.
- There is a clear need for Universal OSGi. The automotive industry needs an equal OSGi framework in native for safety critical applications. Both native and Java framework running on the same platform should be able to make use of each other. An update of RFP 89 will soon be provided.
VEG is organizing another workshop and expert group on September 25 and 26 in Madrid, hosted by Telefonica. Non-OSGi member are welcome to participate the first day, as we want to collect also information from the European automotive industry. The second day will be for OSGi members only in order to discuss the outcome of the workshops and to decide how to proceed. Invitations will be send out soon.
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The Core Platform Expert Group (CPEG) has continues to work on new features for the 4.2 release as well as address issues and enhancement requests against the current 4.1 spec. CPEG has had several face-to-face meetings co-located with the Enterprise Expert Group as well as bi-weekly conference calls.
We are also starting the project plan to drive the 4.2 release to closure. Several proposed key milestones include final spec production by 13 Mar 2009 and final RI and TCK production by 12 Jun 2009. These dates are the current strawman dates and more detail is needed to firm them up. You can see the draft project plan which include the proposed content.
The next CPEG face-to-face meeting is scheduled for 17 Sep 2009 in Piscataway, NJ but we will continue to have bi-weekly calls before then. Please see the OSGi member's calendar for details on attending the CPEG meetings.
Please visit, the OSGi Alliance Working Groups to learn more about each Expert Group.
OSGi Technology in the News
SD Times 100: 2008
SD Times,
June 2, 2008
Distributed OSGi Effort Progresses
By Darryl K. Taft
EWeek,
June 13, 2008
SOA in a JVM: OSGi Service Platform - A Dynamic Component System for Java
SOA World Magazine,
June 30, 2008
Kirk Knoernschild
Burton Group
The Whiteboard Pattern for OSGi
The Server Side,
May 2008
Universal Middleware: What's Happening With OSGi and Why You Should Care
SOA World Magazine/Java Developers Journal
February 5, 2008
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