Eric Newcomer's Weblog

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.

As I sometimes say, being CTO of IONA is great because I get to be involved in a lot of different things. Take the Aepona User Forum for example.

During my career I've ended up working in various telecom related efforts and spent a good bit of time at TM Forum meetings, and not only for IONA. I had this particular affliction before I joined ;-)

Those of you outside of the telecom industry may not hear much about SDP (aka SOA based on Web services applied to telco industry requirements), but if you are in the telecom industry (or selling to it) you are probably hearing a lot about it.

This is what Aepona is chiefly involved in at the moment (aka Web services for telecom) and I am proud to both say that they are using IONA's Artix in their product and that I will be giving an update on Web services at their upcoming Forum.