OSGi has been in the press a lot lately. Everywhere you turn there is some new product or project adopting the technology. From Eclipse to Apache to Spring. From servers to desktops to embedded. OSGi enables the creation of highly modular, dynamic Java-based systems.
Wondering what its all about? Join book author and Equinox OSGi project co-lead Jeff McAffer (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780321561510) and PDE OSGi tooling lead Chris Aniszczyk for an introduction to Equinox and OSGi concepts and look at the breadth and depth of technology available in this space.
Based on the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF), an open-source project managed by the Eclipse Foundation, the TOGAF Customizer can be used to implement TOGAF 9 more easily. TOGAF is an industry-consensus framework and method for enterprise architecture (EA) developed by The Open Group, and released in February.
In this interview from EclipseCon, I talk with multi-RedMonkTV guest Jeff McAffer, one of the leads on the Equinox project. Having spoken with him about Equinox many times before, I start by asking him to give us an update on what’s been going on in Equinox-land of late. In doing so, we speak about how Equinox is related to the OSGi Enterprise and other specifications.
The Riena project has just released it's 1.0 version recently. In this article, I'll show you how to get going with Riena by walking you through my own experiences using the project. As well as providing a little background on the project I will show how to create a UI with Riena, and run through an example of remote services.
The OSGi Alliance announced that many leading Enterprise Service Bus providers in the market have demonstrated their commitment to the platform through the current or planned employment of OSGi technology in their ESBs and products that utilize ESBs.
Equinox was perfect for us. It takes care of many of the integration details for us and the bundle mechanism is ideal for mixing and matching functionality to meet specific use cases.
Most recently CAS Software has been working on a product called CAS PIA (Personal Information Assistant) which will be a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, the first such offering from CAS. It is built on a number of technologies which will be discussed in more detail later. This case study will take a focus on Eclipse RAP (Rich Ajax Platform) and how it was applied to the architecture of CAS PIA, as well as some interesting uses for RAP, lessons learned by CAS while using it, and future directions for their products.
DZone today launched the Equinox Refcard, covering everything that you need to know to get started on writing OSGi bundles for Equinox, Eclipse's OSGi implementation. The Refcard is written by the project's founder and co-leader, Jeff McAffer. I asked Jeff some questions about Equinox to coincide with the release of the Refcard.
The Riena project at Eclipse reached a new milestone earlier this month: Christian Campo announced 1.0.0 M3 on the Eclipse Riena newsgroup. This milestone is notable as it contains a first draft of Eclipse RCP user-interface changes that are being planned with Riena. One of the Riena project goals, as detailed in the original project proposal, is to provide a more business-oriented user experience
After letting it rest way to long, I finally got around to editing and publishing this short video with Neil Bartlett from EclipseCon 2008. As the title implies, we talk about the next major version of Eclipse, "e4," get into a discussion about the Equinox, and wrap up talking about Neil and other’s work on getting OSGi running on Android.
The Eclipse Persistence Services project (EclipseLink) has completed its incubation phase and the 1.0 release is available for download. This release completes the transition of the persistence functionality developed in Oracle TopLink to being fully developed and maintained as an open source project at Eclipse. This also signifies the first release of a project under the recently created top-level Runtime (RT) project at Eclipse.
The Eclipse Persistence Services Project, more commonly known as EclipseLink, is a comprehensive open source persistence solution. EclipseLink was started by a donation of the full source code and test suites of Oracle's TopLink product. This project brings the experience of over 12 years of commercial usage and feature development to the entire Java community. This evolution into an open source project is now complete and developers will soon have access to the EclipseLink 1.0 release.
As part of the upcoming Eclipse Ganymede release which is scheduled for June 25th, InfoQ will cover a series of Eclipse subprojects. Today, the subproject is RAP (Rich Ajax Platform), which is releasing version 1.1. InfoQ spoke with Jochen Krause to learn more about RAP and what it provides.
p2 is the new provisioning system which will be provided along with the Eclipse Ganymede release on June 25th. This is one feature that I didn't really follow closely enough,so I was really happy when I called Pascal Rapicault to get an explanation from the project lead.Ian Skerrett has recently blogged about 10 reasons p2 is going to rock, and after reading this, I'm sure you'll agree.
This is the first in a series of four articles previewing the Eclipse Foundation's annual downloadable project release, code named Ganymede, which is set for Wednesday, June 25.
s part of the upcoming Eclipse Ganymede release, scheduled for June 25th, InfoQ is covering a series of Eclipse subprojects. Today, the topic is the Eclipse Communication Framework. InfoQ spoke with Scott Lewis, project lead for ECF and Principal at his consulting company, Composent, Inc to learn more about ECF and what capabilities it provides.
As part of the upcoming Eclipse Ganymede release, scheduled for June 25th, InfoQ will cover a series of Eclipse subprojects. Today, the subproject is Equinox p2 (Provisioning Platform), which is a framework for provisioning Eclipse-based applications. InfoQ spoke with Jeff McAffer and Pascal Rapicault to learn more about p2 and what it provides.
I blogged last week about an example application that I’ve been building. Building good examples is pretty hard: you want an example to be simple enough to understand. At the same time, it has to be real enough to useful and expose real issues. I think that this application strikes a reasonable balance. The Eclipse Business Expense Reporting and Tracking (EBERT) application is a relatively small, but provides a valuable service. At least as a business traveler who has to work with Excel-based expense forms, it’s valuable to me.
While SkiData found Equinox a graceful environment, the move to a whole new development platform on a tight schedule was a challenge in itself. They were able to hire a professional development firm, MicroDoc GmbH of Munich, Germany, to provide Java, Equinox and Eclipse expertise while they focused their domain knowledge on business logic.
OSGi has been mentioned quite a bit in the industry lately, with Equinox becoming a top-level project for Eclipse, Felix being used as a container for Sling and Glassfish V3, and Spring-Modules being released. That said, a lot of people who are unfamiliar with OSGi ... are still unfamiliar with it, no matter how much the people who use OSGi regularly know about it.
It's a well known fact among those working on SOA projects there is no such thing as "SOA in a box" or a silver bullet for achieving an SOA, so much as it is a combination of software infrastructure, design philosophy, tools and, of course, buy in from the top brass at any organization. It's, in essence, a series of pieces, each of which gets a project closer to its full statement of intent and purpose for building a SOA. Up next, we will explore one of these pieces which aims at gaining you a few percentage points on your overall SOA gauge, and stands to influence a few more pieces that may already be part of your SOA strategy: the Eclipse Swordfish project.
In part 1, Aslam Khan, technical director of PBT Group, introduced us to OSGi. Today, in the final part, he completes his argument about OSGi's applicability in the enteprise. In part 1, he discussed OSGi's problem domain. There, he explained issues surrounding dynamic class management and how OSGi responds to these issues. In this final part, he tackles the two other problem areas outlined previously: the lack of versioning of Java classes and the lack of modularity in the context of classpath hell. How does OSGi fill these gaps? Finally, how ready is OSGi to be used for real? Aslam also answers this question.
The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) defines an architecture for developing and deploying modular applications and libraries. In this first article in a three-part introduction to OSGi, Sunil Patil gets you started with OSGi development concepts and shows you how to build a simple Hello World application using the Eclipse OSGi container implementation, Equinox. He also touches briefly on building service-oriented applications using OSGi and introduces OSGi's ServiceFactory and ServiceTracker classes.
In this two-part article, Aslam Khan, technical director of PBT Group, a software consultancy based in South Africa, introduces you to OSGi and discusses its relevance specifically in the context of the enterprise. What is the exact problem domain of OSGi in this area? In this first part, he uses code snippets to show how the issues surrounding dynamic class management can be tackled. -- Geertjan Wielenga, JavaLobby Zone Leader
I spend some time playing with Spring Dynamic Modules (Spring-DM) and Eclipse (resp. its underlying OSGi platform Equinox) the other day. I had some minor annoyances in the beginning concerning the initial setup, since i didn’t found any comprehensible source on the web on what bundles are needed at least and what else is necessary in order to run your own Spring-DM-ified bundles.
The following instructions will show you all the steps you have to accomplish in order to set up a minimalistic workspace in eclipse for creating or droping in and executig arbitrary Spring-DM bundles.
The major announcement this week at EclipseCon surrounds Equinox becoming a top level project. Just before the conference I caught up with two of the leading people in the Eclipse community to discuss this announcement and what it means.
Ian Skerrett is Director of Marketing for the Eclipse Foundation, and a regular contributor to Eclipse Zone. Jeff McAffer is Equinox Project Lead, leads the RCP project and is one of the original architects of Eclipse.
The Eclipse Foundation will branch out in the realm of component-oriented software development on Monday and also unveil an umbrella project unifying several runtime initiatives.
The efforts will be featured at the EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Conference highlights also include a presentation by an executive from Eclipse holdout Microsoft on Wednesday.
The Eclipse Foundation is announcing a runtime initiative based on Equinox, the organization's implementation of the Open Services Gateway Initiative technology.
In an interview with eWEEK, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said the group is "announcing a runtime initiative by taking a number of projects and starting a new top level project," to be known as the Eclipse Runtime project or Eclipse RT.
I’ve mentioned previously that Eclipse is coming alive as a place for runtime technology. The last few days have seen some more concrete steps down that path. Last Wednesday the Eclipse RT top-level project had a successful creation review. So over the next few days the project itself will be provisioned and open for business. In the proposal there were 6 projects declaring their intention to move: Equinox, RAP, ECF, Swordfish, Riena and EclipseLink. While the path is now clear for these moves, I wouldn’t expect to see a mad rush. Each project will move at its own pace. After all, several of the projects are shooting to release in the next few months and really don’t need the distraction of messing with repositories, bugs, etc. There are several other projects including eRCP, EILF and Corona that have expressed interest in a new home. Most likely there will be some discussions on this at EclipseCon and on the RT newsgroup in the coming days.
The news at EclipseCon is something the Eclipse community has been doing for a while but not a lot of people know about it. The press announcement at EclipseCon is our new runtime initiative: the creation of the top-level Eclipse RT project and a new Equinox Community.
The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) defines an architecture for developing and deploying modular applications and libraries. In this first article in a three-part introduction to OSGi, Sunil Patil gets you started with OSGi development concepts and shows you how to build a simple Hello World application using the Eclipse OSGi container implementation, Equinox. He also touches briefly on building service-oriented applications using OSGi and introduces OSGi's ServiceFactory and ServiceTracker classes.
The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) Alliance is working to realize the vision of a "universal middleware" that will address issues such as application packaging, versioning, deployment, publication, and discovery.
This post covers setting up a an OSGi development environment with Eclipse Equinox. It demonstrates running OSGi from a command prompt and from the Eclipse Equinox framework. The next post will cover how to run the Equinox JSP, JSTL, and Struts OSGi example projects on an embedded Jetty server.
Formed in 1999, the OSGi alliance made its first steps into the Java market within the embedded device segment. Years later it further extended its reach to Java desktop projects, providing a major foundation for the modularity and extensibility of the Eclipse open-source IDE project. Now, as the service's era is dawning, OSGi is stepping into its latest Java frontier: the server side.
