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.
