Life goes on and so does OSGi™ adoption!
 
Despite the economic challenges, or perhaps because of these challenges, the demand for OSGi skills continues to rise. Whilst modest in comparison to the explosive demand for ‘Big Data’ skills, the trend is neither the less significant. From direct experience, courtesy of my day job, it is clear that for many organizations OSGi is no longer under evaluation; rather, OSGi is chosen in anger to address real enterprise issues and increasingly proven in deployment. If recent interest in OSGi training is any indicator, I expect the demand for OSGi skills to continue to accelerate through 2012 -- perhaps a prediction I should report back on in early 2013.

Membership
I’d like to welcome Hitachi and NEC Corporation to the Alliance Board of Directors. Both companies have been longtime members of the Alliance. I’d also like to welcome again Adobe Systems to the Alliance and to the Board. Finally, I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome our latest OSGi Alliance members, Technicolor and France Télécom-Orange. I believe it is an ongoing Alliance strength that membership is global in representation, comprised of large and small companies with a diverse range of interests. 

Dates for the Diary
This year, our OSGi Community Event is co-located with EclipseCon Europe 2012. The date is Oct. 23-25, 2012, and is located in Ludwigsburg, Germany. The theme of the event is “Reducing Complexity with OSGi.” I’m sure this will spark interesting debates and collaboration within the OSGi community, including Alliance members and non-members alike!  Accelerating OSGi adoption also provides our community an increased number of proof points, use cases, success stories and best practices.  So even die-hard OSGi users and fans can find new and actionable ideas at the Community Event.

We invite you to join us in exploring these concepts and share your OSGi perspectives. Mark your calendar. Registration opens soon.

Hope to see you there!

Activities and Emerging Interests
While the Expert Groups just wrapped the newest batch of REG, EEG and Core specifications, discussions have turned to possible priorities beyond the current set of in-flight specifications. One area flagged by Neil Bartlett and Felix Meschberger is further standardization work in the Web area to ensure that OSGi developers have a really first-class experience. Current thoughts are being collected on our OSGi community website and I encourage all of you with an interest in this area to contribute to the debate.

Whilst the term “cloud” is increasingly over-marketed and ill-defined, it is clear that the “cloud phenomena” is changing the way in which both home gateway solution providers and traditional enterprise environments think about their IT infrastructure and business systems. Throughout this year, the OSGi Alliance will be reaching out to cloud communities and end users, explaining the benefits of OSGi standards with emphasis on the need for modularity and well-defined service and life-cycle models, and how these are essential, fundamental build-blocks for robust and agile “cloud” solutions. These capabilities are naturally derived from the open industry specifications that the OSGi Alliance continues to create, including the latest OSGi Bundle Respository (OBR) and the OSGi Remote Service specifications.

CLOSING REMARKS
The idea of agile, flexible environments is now a strategic objective for most organizations.  Interest is high for agile development practices and continuous release methodologies  (i.e. Kanban). I would like to suggest that OSGi is a fundamental enabler of Java centric organizations that want to pursue these best practices. How can you have lean/agile development methodologies and continuous release when your code base consists of large, monolithic, opaque software artifacts? Surely Modularity needs to be central to any successful Lean and Agile strategy? That is, one needs an M.L.A strategy. I would love to hear from those of you who have experience within the agile software community, both to understand your perspective on OSGi as an agile/lean enabler and to understand how the Alliance might become more relevant to your communities.

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or comments on any of the topics discussed here or anything else, please send me an email. I am sincerely interested in your feedback so do not hesitate!

Sincerely,

Richard Nicholson
President,
OSGi Alliance

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KEYNOTES ANNOUNCED FOR OSGi COMMUNITY EVENT 2012

The exciting keynote speakers for OSGi Community Event 2012, “Reducing Complexity with OSGi,” have been announced. The event, Oct. 23-25, 2012, in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and co-located with EclipseCon Europe 2012, will feature keynote addresses from:

1. Jörg Lamprecht, CTO and founder of Aibotix
2. John Duimovich, distinguished engineer and Chief Technology Officer for Java technology at IBM, and a long-term leader in the Eclipse community
3. Christian Heilmann, Mozilla evangelist, who has dedicated his career to making the web a better place

Ongoing interest has extended the call for papers to July 31, so there’s still time to submit a talk.

The OSGi Community Event 2012 will feature OSGi talks, tutorials and panels. It is co-located with EclipseCon Europe 2012 and will share a common registration and submission system. The event is expected to attract enterprise and embedded software architects, IT decision-makers and software leaders, as well as developers who are using OSGi as the basis for their next-generation IT infrastructure.

The program will showcase and explore real-world case studies, best practices, and tutorials about OSGi technology. The theme this year is “Reducing Complexity with OSGi” and emphasizes why modularity is important and how OSGi technology is the best way to modularize JavaTM applications and enable innovative business solutions. If you also want to present your case study or best practices at the OSGi Community Event, please submit now.

OSGi Community Event 2012 will be held at the Forum am Schlosspark in Ludwigsburg, Germany (near Stuttgart).

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The restructured OSGi Alliance invites greater participation by more organizations with its new membership levels. Longtime Alliance members Hitachi and NEC Corporation, as well as Adobe Systems, have taken advantage of the leadership opportunities in Strategic Membership and now serve with the other longstanding directors on the Board of Directors in a governing role.

Organizations considering OSGi Alliance membership, and members whose previous membership levels expire in 2012, should review the privileges and benefits of the restructured Alliance and join.

Tiered membership pricing for the new Principal Member level encourages companies large and small to run for an Alliance officer position and commercially license OSGi Alliance Compliance Tests at no additional cost. Technicolor SA and France Télécom-Orange, the Alliance’s newest members, joined as Principal Members.

Restructured membership also introduced a new level of participation for organizations with a technical focus on OSGi specifications and technology, Contributing Associates. Contributing Associates have non-commercial access to OSGi Alliance Compliance Tests for a fee and up to two individuals can participate in or access membership privileges, including expert groups, expert group activities, members-only web pages on www.osgi.org, Requirements Committee attendance and document input, new expert group proposals, annual member meetings, and discounts for OSGi workshops and community events.

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Core, Enterprise, Residential and Compendium specifications now available for download

The OSGi Alliance announced in June the availability of four new OSGi specifications that make software development easier. The new specifications now available for download are OSGi Core Release 5, OSGi Enterprise Release 5, OSGi Service Platform Residential Specification Release 4 Version 4.3, and OSGi Service Platform Compendium Release 4 Version 4.3.

OSGi technology provides a modular architecture for today’s large-scale distributed systems as well as small, embedded applications. Building systems from in-house and off-the-shelf modules significantly reduces complexity and thus development and maintenance expenses.

“OSGi technology is already shipping in millions of units worldwide, and is deployed by Fortune Global 500 companies in enterprise, desktop, embedded home and telematics markets. These new specifications continue OSGi technology’s market-driven, service-oriented commitment to software modularity,” said Richard Nicholson, president of the OSGi Alliance. “Each addition or update is intended to streamline and increase development and maintenance efficiencies and address challenges developers face daily in real-world scenarios.”

The new specifications and some of their notable features include:

OSGi Core Release 5

• New Resource API for modeling generic capabilities and requirements.
• New Version Range class.

OSGi Enterprise Release 5

• New Repository Service Specification provides declarative access to artifact repositories based on the generic capabilities and requirements model. Where traditional repositories have typically provided artifacts based on their name, version and group, the OSGi Repository can provide artifacts based on capabilities, such as packages exported, services provided, extender functionality provided or custom-defined capabilities.
• New Resolver Service Specification. Based on the generic capabilities and requirements model, a management agent can use the Resolver service to compute the set of necessary resources needed to satisfy the given set of requirements. The Resolver is designed to work with the Repository Service, if available.
• New Subsystems Service Specification provides the ability to group multiple bundles into a single manageable entity, allows for complete isolation as well as various sharing models of code, services, and resources through a management agent. The Subsystem Service Specification defines an archive format to package multiple bundles, the Enterprise Subsystem Archive (.esa).
• New Service Loader Mediator Specification addresses common problems of bundles that rely on the java.util.ServiceLoader API to load custom Service Provider Implementations. It describes how to use the service registry for lookup of Service Providers as well as a solution for existing code to continue functioning using Service Loader API in a OSGi environment.
• New Common Namespaces Specification for use with the generic OSGi capabilities and requirements model.
• The Extender Namespace allows a bundle that requires an extender, such as Declarative Services or Blueprint, to express this dependency.
• The Contract Namespace provides a shorthand for many Import-Package statements for technologies which span multiple packages.
• The Service Namespace allows a bundle to express that it provides or consumes a certain service.
• Updated JMX Management Model Specification.
• Object names now contain framework name and UUID, which allow multiple frameworks to be represented side-by-side.
• Updated the JMX API to reflect the latest Core API, specifically the bundle wiring API.
• Many improvements as requested by users, often focused on limiting the amount of data communicated via JMX APIs.
• Updated Configuration Admin Specification.
• Added targeted PIDs, which can be useful when configuring multiple versions of the same bundle through Configuration Admin.
• Added persistent change count to make it easier to detect changes.
• Added Synchronous Configuration Listener.

OSGi Service Platform Residential Specification Release 4 Version 4.3

The services of the Residential specification were designed to support requirements for execution environments in consumer premises equipment (CPE) and other consumer devices, as well as protocols for the management of residential environments. The Residential specifications are aligned with HGI, the Broadband Forum (BBF) and the UPnP Forum, which define requirements, architecture and management protocols for the smart home environment. Here, the scope of management protocols spans the remote management of millions of CPE devices by a telecommunications provider as well as local management of single consumer devices in a home or residence building.

• The Dmt Admin Service Specification provides an API for a remote manager to manage the device and the diverse services running on it.
• The Residential Device Management specification defines a Residential Management Tree providing a general Dmt Admin object model that allows browsing and managing the OSGi environment remotely over different Protocol Adapters.
• The TR-157a3 Software Module Guidelines specification provides a recommended mapping for the generic concepts defined by the Broadband Forum in “TR-157/3 Component Objects for CWMP” to the OSGi Framework concepts. 
• The TR-069 Connector Service Specification provides an API based on the TR-069 Remote Procedure Calls concept that is implemented on top of Dmt Admin. This connector supports data conversion and the object modeling constructs defined in the Dmt Admin service. 

OSGi Service Platform Compendium Release 4 Version 4.3

• Includes specifications introduced by the Enterprise Release 4 Version 4.2.
• Remote Services Admin, JTA, JDBC, JNDI, JPA, Web Applications, SCA Configuration Type.
• New Coordination Specification, which provides a mechanism for multiple parties to collaborate on a common task without a priori knowledge of who will collaborate in that task. A collaborator can participate by adding a Participant to the Coordination. The Coordination will notify the Participants when the coordination is ended or when it is failed.
• Updated Configuration Admin.
• Allow multiple bundles to access the same configuration.
• Updated security model to allow configuration "regions".
• Updated Declarative Services.
• Allow service references to receive service updates.
• Allow greedy service bindings.
• Compile time annotations to simplify authoring components.
• Updated Event Admin.
• Allow out of order asynchronous delivery of events.

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OSGi Alliance members are invited to participate in the OSGi Product Spotlight program and submit use cases or success stories for publication on the OSGi website.  These unique marketing opportunities are for Alliance members only. The deadline for new and updated OSGi Product Spotlight submissions is Sept. 14, 2012. Contact Alisa Hicks, OSGi marketing manager, for a product spotlight submission guideline or content requirements for a use case.

The OSGi Product Spotlight showcases your OSGi product on our website. The OSGi Product Spotlight program will randomly select from among the submissions a member’s product to showcase on its home page (with every home page refresh) to demonstrate the widespread deployment of OSGi technology in diverse markets. It is also an opportunity to highlight your product for the OSGi community. Showcased products will be linked to a dedicated page on the Alliance site, which will include your brief product description and a link to your product’s web page.

OSGi use cases, or success stories, dig deeper than OSGi Product Spotlights and are limited in number. Only a few opportunities remain in 2012 for success story features so please submit your materials by Oct. 1, 2012. While the Alliance will write the success story, members must provide required information, including a market situation, product description, and quotes from customers and/or organization leadership. Participating members must provide information at least one sidebar feature in the success story.

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