I’m presenting at Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 which happens in about a week from today.
I’ll be speaking about OSGi Versioning and Testing with Jeff McAffer and Paul VanderLei. Please consider coming to the talk, it should be fun and will involve discussion of painting fences with neighbors.
Here’s the abstract:
The old saying goes, good fences make for good neighbors. Modular systems are all about the fences, otherwise known as contracts. OSGi-based systems are simply compositions of modules and contracts. To express contracts in OSGi, we use version numbers. From our experience in the Eclipse community, we have found that managing API and these contracts a difficult process.
In the first part of this talk, we’ll discuss the problem of version numbering and managing change. We’ll bring forward real world examples that demonstrate the complexities in managing change, including examples from the Eclipse community where change has caused havoc. There will be a demonstration of some the tools we developed at Eclipse to help manage change in your OSGi-based applications.
In the second part of this talk we draw on experiences and examples from the OSGi and Equinox book to identify key elements of modularity and point out best practices for designing and building modular systems using OSGi. Along the way we highlight pitfalls and anti-patterns and talk about ease of testing as barometer for modularity.
On a side note, over 30 people have signed up for the Eclipse Summit Europe 5K run every morning!
Please don’t forget to sign up if you want to run and burn off some Kirsch.