OSGi Community Event

I have just come back from the OSGi Community Event in London (Sept 29, 30 2010). I have been aware of OSGi for a number of years without ever having taken a good look. base2's recent partnering with FUSE has changed all that, and I thought attending this conference would be one way to catch up on all the things that have been happening.

After the first couple of hours of the conference I realised we have got a very very great deal of catching up to do. Sometime in the next year OSGi is going to be an 'overnight sensation' - which I'm sure will bring a wry smile to the faces of the people I met at the conference who have been beavering away with the OSGi technology and concepts - for up to 10 years in some cases. So for all of you technologists who are where I was at a couple of months ago, if you want to get your head around OSGi, where it is today, and why it is coming your way soon - here is a some reading to get started with in your idle moments.

First thing you need to read are these four articles on the OSGi Alliance site. It is quite likely that you will follow some of the links in the getting started article and never get back here, but if you do there is more interesting material below.

Benefits of using OSGi

The OSGi Architecture

OSGi Technology Overview

Getting Started With OSGi

Firstly Eclipse is all about OSGi, all Eclipse plugins are OSGi bundles being deployed into Eclipse Equinox (3rd party ones at that, which is why occasionally they don't work so well - the plugin author is often creating their very first OSGi bundle). Some Eclipse projects using/providing OSGi that I know about are:

One of the two pre-eminent OSGi containers - Equinox

An OSGi Application Server - Virgo

The BIRT Reporting Application

Then there is the Apache work:

The other pre-eminent OSGi container - Felix

The FUSE ESB centrepiece - ServiceMix

An OSGi runtime to house an OSGi container - Karaf

Distributed OSGi RI (AKA FUSE Services Framework) - CFX

The JMS Provider (AKA FUSE Messaging) - Active MQ

The Enterprise Toolkit - Aries

Now - Remember Roy Fielding and all that REST - Sling

There is the whole world of stuff happening at WSO2 - dont go in there - you'll get lost -but - the Stratos Cloud platform based on the OSGi compliant Carbon looks pretty amazing; and anybody that has been looking for an Atom based RESTful Registry with comprehensive Repository capabilities, as I have for quite some time - Governance Registry ticks all my function points.

Then there is Nimble - if you have got this far you can figure it out for yourself - it looks pretty slick, I think we will be using it

Now we are getting to the extreme end of the world - actually that just means I haven't figured out what it is for yet - but Peaberry - check it out.

Good luck with all that

Neil