Friday, May 7, 2010

Presentation: What's new in OSGi 4.2 Enterprise

Just as I was setting off to travel to the Jax OSGi day in Mainz earlier this week my plans got disrupted by another plume of volcanic ash. Only hitting Ireland and Scotland this time, but enough to close Irish airspace for the day. So I wasn't able to deliver my presentation about the new specifications in the OSGi 4.2 Enterprise Release. Lucky enough my friend Roman Roelofsen was at the conference. He has given the talk instead at short notice. Thanks Roman!
This is the presentation that I gave at Jax London and Tim Diekmann also used it at EclipseCon 2010. A number of people have asked to get access to it, so here it is!

Thursday, May 6, 2010

New OSGi spec drafts available!

Recently the OSGi Alliance has published two new drafts that contain the RFC contents for a number of future specifications.

There is a new draft for the OSGi Core 4.3 release: http://www.osgi.org/download/osgi-core-4.3-early-draft1.pdf. This draft contains:
  • RFC 138 which describes running multiple frameworks in a single VM. 
  • RFC 151 updates the core framework API to include Java 5 generics.
  • RFC 154 introduces generic capabilities and requirements to the OSGi resolver.
Also released was a new draft for the OSGi 4.2 Residential release: http://www.osgi.org/download/osgi-residential-4.2-early-draft3.pdf. This draft contains a number of highly specific specs for the residential area with the notable exception of RFC 144, which has a general impact on OSGi:
  • RFC 144 Configuration Admin Extension. The extensions described in the RFP are twofold. The Configuration Permissions are extended. Additionally, with RFC 144 it is now possible for multiple bundles to consume a single Configuration Object. So it means that with that it's possible to share a common Configuration Object across many bundles! This is one thing that I've been looking for a long time, and it will benefit many OSGi Core and Enterprise users as well...
As with previous early draft releases. These specs aren't finished yet, but this should give people a good idea of where things are going and also allow opensource projects to start implementing!