Tuesday, June 7, 2011

OSGi Enterprise Specification Early Access Draft available!

An early access draft for the upcoming OSGi Enterprise Specifications has just been made available. This is really interesting stuff and it shows what we've been working on in the Enterprise Expert Group over the last year or so. Although still work in progress, some of these specifications will be included in the next OSGi Enterprise Release which is currently planned to be released during the first half of 2012.

The main theme for the Enterprise Release is around Subsystem/Application support and OBR (the OSGi Bundle Repository). These are covered in RFC's 152 and 112. Together they greatly improve the way you can define and distribute, assemble and install OSGi applications and I'm really looking forward to the moment that these specs are finished and broadly implemented.

Additionally you can find in the draft: RFC 146 JCA support, two new Blueprint specifications and an update to the JMX specification (chapter 124 in the Enterprise Release 4.2).

Finally there is RFC 167. This is a new RFC that I've been working on. It intends to fix a small but quite annoying issue: the fact that java.util.ServiceLoader() and META-INF/services use generally don't work in OSGi. You can work around it, as I've blogged about in 2008, but it's ugly. Using RFC 167 this issue can be addressed so that any non-OSGi code that uses this pattern can work in OSGi without too much hassle. I've been working on an implementation of this in Apache Aries, if you're interested in trying it out.

Note that the specifications are not yet final so significant changes might still occur. Also, feedback is welcomed! You can leave comments here on my blog or write an email to the osgi-dev mailing list.

You can find the EA draft here: http://www.osgi.org/download/osgi-early-draft-2011-05.pdf

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