I've worked in a lot of standards committees and I have to say the OSGi enterprise expert group (EEG) is the best experience I've had in many years. I've heard others say that as well - it's not just me.
Here we are finishing up the most recent EEG face to face meeting, held last week at the IONA offices in Waltham, MA.
As I have said before, we are just starting on the "fun" part -- i.e. the design part. We have been debating requirements and proposals for modularizing JEE, mapping Spring to OSGi, interworking with existing distributed systems, mapping SCA to OSGi, among several other topics.
In the room and on the phone are folks from IBM, BEA, Oracle, Apache, Red Hat/JBoss, Siemens, Interface21, ProSyst, IONA, and aQute. You will quickly notice the absence of one major Java vendor, and this does indeed raise questions about the future direction for Java, especially in the enterprise.
Developing OSGi for the enterprise
We have a great group working on several parts of the set of requirements identified for enterprise OSGi, but other areas still do not have any driver. Yes, you need to be a member of OSGi, or have your work sponsored by a member, but these are relatively simple problems to overcome, compared to the tremendous potential benefits.
Comments (5)
Eric as a long time user of IONA products, we have been delighted with the strategic direction that IONA has taken over the last few years. Like many others we are now happily using Artix (version 5 no less) in an commercial environment. What maybe of interest is that we have been using Artix inside an OSGi environment (Equinox). I would be interested in your views around IONA's adoption of OSGi and how you see your products evolving with this technology.
Regards.
Posted by Damian O'Neill | August 20, 2007 5:09 AM
Posted on August 20, 2007 05:09
Damian,
Thanks very much for your kind words.
We are in the midst of planning out how exactly we will be adopting OSGi and when the products will be released. You notice I said "when" not "if" so I hope it is clear this is the direction in which we're heading. We do not have specific release dates yet, at least not anything we can share publicly.
But I can say that I see OSGi as a core enabler for product modularity and a key potential platform for compatibility of modules across vendors. I think we may see OSGi do for runtimes what Eclipse (based on OSGi) has already done for IDEs, but this will take a bit of time, as significant change always does.
Eric
Posted by Eric Newcomer | August 20, 2007 2:23 PM
Posted on August 20, 2007 14:23
OMG, is that Anselm Baird-Smith?! I thought he dropped off the face of the earth after leaving Sun.
Posted by Mark Baker | August 28, 2007 4:29 PM
Posted on August 28, 2007 16:29
Hi Mark,
I don't think anyone by that name was in the room... ;-(
Posted by Eric Newcomer | August 29, 2007 5:07 PM
Posted on August 29, 2007 17:07
Doh, my bad. The guy touching his forehead by the whiteboard is a spitting image for him.
P.S. Anselm was the lead on the Java Embedded Server project at Sun, from whence the Connected Alliance (now known as OSGI) sprung.
Posted by Mark Baker | August 30, 2007 3:37 PM
Posted on August 30, 2007 15:37