Co-chairing the Enterprise Expert Group

Last week the OSGi Enterprise Expert group has elected me as their new co-chair after Eric Newcomer is moving on to greener pastures elsewhere. I have to say that I'm thankful for the confidence that the EEG has in me and would like to thank everyone for their support. Obviously I will be taking on the role together with my esteemed co-chair Tim Diekmann, who has been in this role since the EEG started.

Here's a little bit about me. I work for Progress Software in Dublin, Ireland and worked for IONA technologies for about 10 years before they were acquired by Progress. During my time I've worked on a number of products which include Orbix the IONA Corba product, a J2EE Appserver, Mobile Middleware and a Repository product. I've also been involved with the Apache and Eclipse open source projects where I am a committer on CXF and on the STP Policy component respectively. Before I joined IONA, I worked in the Netherlands for a Cap Gemini subsidiary called Bolesian. I've been active in the OSGi EEG since it started in January 2007, and have been one of the drivers behind Distributed OSGi, now called 'Remote Services' which is released in OSGi 4.2.

Looking forward, things will be busy. Within the EEG everybody is working really hard on the 'OSGi 4.2 Enterprise' release, which we're planning to get out at around the end of this year. We're hoping to get a bunch of JavaEE mappings in, things like Webapps, JPA, JTA, JMX, JDBC, JNDI. Being an army of volunteers, its hard to guarantee that they will all make it, but at least I know everyone is doing their very best to get there.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Eric Newcomer, which whom I have worked for many years for the excellent work he has done in OSGi and wishing him the very best for his new job that he is starting soon.