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Posts Tagged with “osgi”

October 27, 2010
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CFP: OSGi DevCon 2011

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The Call for Papers for OSGi DevCon 2011 has recently been opened!

The deadline for submissions is November 30th, 2010 (talks submitted before the 17th November have an extra chance of getting selected due to a contest). If you have never have submitted a talk to OSGi DevCon, I highly recommend you checking out the submission guidelines.

For those who don’t know, for the past 5 years OSGi DevCon has been co-located with EclipseCon. In my opinion, this partnership has been great for both communities as both have benefited from cross-pollination. Eclipse was one of the earliest adopters of OSGi and has shown that you can build an extensive platform and community by taking advantage of standard OSGi technology and modularity.

For submitters, it’s important to note that all talks about OSGi are welcome. A colleague recently pinged me if he could submit a talk on hacking Felix and of course I said yes! Just because the OSGi DevCon is co-located with EclipseCon doesn’t mean we’ll only take talks that involve Equinox. The program committee will select what it thinks are the best talks for attendees. So if you’re doing something cool with OSGi, from adopting or hacking it, please submit your talks soon!

April 5, 2010
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Gemini Webinar @ EclipseLive

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The Eclipse Foundation is hosting a webinar in a couple weeks on Gemini…

Gemini Project Lead Mike Keith is presenting a webinar on the relationship between Java EE and OSGi and what the Gemini project is doing in this area. He will detail its relationship to the standards and highlight the role it is playing in implementing a next generation of Java EE architectures. He will go over the various components of the project and show how they can be used by applications and tools alike.

If you are interested in OSGi, I recommend registering. I’ll be there.

April 1, 2010
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Easier Access to the OSGi Console

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In Eclipse 3.6 M7, it will be easier to access the OSGi Console within the running Eclipse. The Equinox team added a org.eclipse.osgi.framework.console.ConsoleSession service that you can use to get the input and output to a console session. The PDE team took advantage of this recently by extending the org.eclipse.ui.console.consoleFactories extension point and allowing you to bring up the OSGi console easily…

This was feature was really put in for some members of the Equinox team but thank you to Dave Carver for encouraging me to blog about it so other people would know about.

March 30, 2010
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OSGi and Lotus Domino?

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Looks like some people are exposing OSGi on Lotus Domino servers.

I especially like the part when they mention the benefits of extensibility, easy deployment and leveraging existing OSGi assets. Oh, the mention that they get “better tooling with Eclipse IDE and its first class Java and plugins editors and Java debugger” is a nice touch too. In all seriousness, the more OSGi gets exposed in the significantly large Lotus ecosystem the better.

March 24, 2010
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OSGi DevCon 2010: OSGi Best and Worst Practices

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Yesterday, Martin Lippert, Jeff McAffer and Paul Vanderlei gave a talk on OSGi Best and Worst Practices.

I really enjoyed the talk because between the four of us, we have a unique and pragmatic perspective on OSGi. I come mostly from a tooling OSGi background but have dabbled in runtime. Martin has been working with enterprise clients deploying OSGi technology for a long time. Paul focuses on embedding OSGi in crazy places. Jeff is just wise OSGi sage, helped Eclipse move to OSGi and has just been doing this forever.

We decided to go the presentation zen approach and it seemed to be received well by the audience. We were a little hesitant at first because deeply technical audiences don’t seem to take the zen style well from my experience, but looks like people enjoyed it. I guess anytime you characterize Peter Kriens as tinkerbell sprinkling OSGi dust everywhere people get a kick out of it.

On top of that, we had a good debate on Require-Bundle versus Import-Package.

I think the devil in the picture above looks more productive, right :)?

In the end, I hope you benefited from our experiences and learned something along the way.

March 21, 2010
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OSGi DevCon 2010 – Working with OSGi

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Tomorrow as part of OSGi DevCon 2010… Simon Archer, Jeff McAffer, Paul Vanderlei and I will be giving an awesome OSGi tutorial. The tutorial will take you through developing a fully functional OSGi-based application based on the famous Toast example from the OSGi and Equinox book.

We’ll cover the key elements of OSGi and creating OSGi-based systems with principles and practices that are applicable in a wide range of application domains and execution scenarios. A lot of time and effort went into the book and Toast example. In my opinion, the Toast example is the best OSGi example out there and you’ll benefit from learning it.

Why should you come to our OSGi tutorial? Well, you’ll have the eyes and ears of four guys who have been doing OSGi for many years. On top of that, you’ll get to hear us make some controversial statements like when programming OSGi, don’t use OSGi. Oh, and you’ll hear Jeff talk about how modularity is the lubrication of collaboration.

March 17, 2010
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Equinox OSGi Book Finally Here

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When I came home last night, I was delighted to find a package (because I’m a fan of gifts).

What was in the package? A brand spanking new copy of the Equinox OSGi book.

In my biased opinion, this is best OSGi book on the market. I’ve had the honor to see the book evolve while it was written. Through that experience, the OSGi tooling at Eclipse (PDE) improved significantly. The authors were kind enough to nag inform me when things didn’t work the way they desired and I did my best to fix everything.

Why is this the best OSGi book on the market? First off, the authors know their stuff and have been working with OSGi before it was cool. Second, the book comes with one of the best example OSGi applications I’ve seen. Third, kind words are said about me in the Acknowledgments section 🙂

The only downside, my last name was spelled wrong in the Acknowledgments section (will be fixed in second printing).

So what are you waiting for, grab the book and play with the Toast example.

If you want hands on training from the authors of the book and me, please attend our tutorial at EclipseCon! It’s not too late to register!

March 4, 2010
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Free Chapter from the OSGi and Equinox Book

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How exciting to finally have the Equinox and OSGi book done (see the book review from DZone). In the Eclipse community, many people complain about the lack of documentation and reference material, well that should be less of a problem given the book and excellent Toast example.

You can download the first chapter for free (and the 6th chapter).

I may be a bit biased (see the kind words about me in the Acknowledgments section of the book), but I believe this is the most comprehensive book on OSGi out there. The authors have many years of practical OSGi experience, from the days to when OSGi wasn’t cool yet (SMF) to when it became the basis of Eclipse. On top of that, I think the best thing that comes out of this book is the open sourced Toast example. Expect to see a lot us within the Eclipse community use this example when we talk about OSGi, Equinox and EclipseRT.

So what are you waiting for, go buy the book and learn about OSGi.

February 25, 2010
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The Future of Application Servers at EclipseCon

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve helped plan and organize a panel at EclipseCon called The Future of Application Servers.

In the past few years, application servers have been evolving rapidly and with the advent of OSGi leaking into application servers, we are seeing modularity being introduced to the typical application developer. The main goals of the panel is to explore what application servers may look like in the future and how application server programming models may evolve. The panel will feature leaders from their respective application server communities… from Eclipse Virgo (dmServer) to IBM Websphere:

  • Glyn Normington (VMWare/SpringSource)
  • Graham Charters (IBM)
  • Rich Sharples (JBoss/Red Hat)
  • Mike Lehmann (Oracle)
  • Greg Wilkins (webtide)

John R. Rymer from Forrester Research will be moderating the panel.

If you’re interested in the future of application servers, swing by and attend EclipseCon!

December 28, 2009
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OSGi, BUG and Modular Hardware

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Over the holidays, I’ve been having a blast with the BUG from Bug Labs.

What is the BUG you ask? Well, it’s a bit hard to explain but on the high level think of it as programmable LEGOs for adults. It’s essentially a collection of electronic modules you can easily snap together and program to make any device or gadget you want. There are many modules available for the BUG…

Using these modules you can build any device you want. Once you have built creation, you can start developing applications for that particular device. For example, I can have the BUGlocate (GPS) and BUGmotion (accelerometer) modules and develop an application that takes a picture between a certain time and tweets the photo.

In my opinion, the coolest thing about the BUG is that it’s open source and enables modularity via OSGi. Under the covers, it is using the Concierge OSGi framework implementation due to size constraints.

Since I’m a hardened OSGi guy, I found developing applications for the BUG really easy. You interact with each of the modules and other applications via OSGi services. For example, the BUGmotion module exposes a com.buglabs.bug.module.motion.pub.IMotionSubject service which you can use to get information about motion events.

In terms of tooling, you’ll be right at home with the Eclipse-based Dragonfly SDK (if you’re an Eclipse person).

The SDK makes it pretty easy to launch, test, deploy and find applications. If you’re familiar with Eclipse and Java development, it should be really easy to get started. If you’re familiar with OSGi development in Eclipse, you’ll feel like you’re right at home. They also use some aspects of the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) from Eclipse to make your life easier (although not as much as I’d like them too). On top of the tooling, the BUG also has an “app store” (called BUGNet) for all of its applications. It’s very easy to browse for applications and have the source downloaded into your SDK.

The ease of browsing and downloading BUG applications makes me jealous as an Eclipse user.

On the whole, I’m very pleased with the BUG. The BUG has changed the way I think about hardware and how it relates to modularity. Furthermore, any company who’s mission is to advance modularity by making it fun and allowing you to build cool devices get kudos from me.

On a side note, given the set of BUG modules, anyone have interesting ideas for an application to develop :)? My current thinking is something that involves the motion module, the camera module, my refrigerator, twitter and late night snacking.

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