Friday, June 28, 2013

Polyglot OSGi: new C/C++ and JavaScript RFPs!

OSGi has been a great Modularity and Services platform for Java for many years. If you look at the Core, Enterprise, Compendium and Residential specifications you will see that a broad spectrum of topics and technologies is covered by OSGi specs.

However, Java isn't the only language in town. And indeed OSGi is already being used by other JVM-based languages, such as Scala as you can see from the Scala Tool Chain page on the OSGi wiki.

Going forward, OSGi will go places where there is no JVM available! Recent work is looking at gathering requirements for OSGi frameworks for JavaScript and C/C++.

A new RFP around OSGi for JavaScript was started. This RFP currently mainly focuses on the OSGi Service Layer and bringing something like that to native JavaScript. You can already find an implementation of many of the concepts in Eclipse Orion. The JavaScript Microservices RFP 159 is in available in bugzilla here: http://www.osgi.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=169

On the C/C++ side, there have been a number of projects that implemented an OSGi-like core framework either in C or in C++. These are use in a variety of contexts from embedded in hardware to image processing systems. The authors of all these projects have put their heads together and started an RFP on a Native OSGi Core Framework. You can find RFP 156 here: https://www.osgi.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=165

I think this is pretty exciting! The concepts of OSGi apply to many environments and languages and its great to now see standardization work happening in these new areas too!

If you have any feedback on these RFPs, leave a comment on the bugs!