Friday, June 8, 2007

Call To Arms: OSGi Community Event

The OSGi Alliance has a community event in Munich on June 26th - 27th, 2007 that you must attend. The program is turning out to be quite interesting! Many of the key players in the OSGi eco system will be around. This is clearly the place to be if you work with OSGi Technology.

Obviously we will have a lot of attention for Enterprise software. Manfred Hutt, (Siemens), and Nicole Wengatz (Siemens) will demonstrate and talk about their use of OSGi in creating large Enterprise applications for business phone exchanges. BEA will show their microService Architecture based on OSGi and how it benefits their customers. Gunnar Wagenknecht (Truition), and Jochen Hiller (Business Operation Systems) will talk about server side Eclipse. Pierre Dubois (Requea) will talk about how to modularize Web Applications using OSGi Technology. The chief architect of the DB4Objects, Carl Rosenberger, will discuss OSGi Technology and persistence. A crucial subject for Enterprise applications.

One of the most exciting OSGi based developments is JSR-232 and the adoption by Sprint. Brandon Annan, their Lead Chief Java Architect, will explain what the plans are with OSGi. For any OSGi developer, these plans are very interesting, even if you never thought about programming for mobiles. The mobile phone is finally becoming a viable application platform for more than games. Just think what you could do if you could easily integrate mobile phone based solutions in your applications?

In the home automation markets we will have an experience reports from Miguel García Longarón (Telefónica). He shows real applications being used in the field. Andre Bottaro, Software Engineer, France Telecom, Sylvain Marie, Software Engineer, Schneider Electric will show how UPnP+OSGi can be used to finally make the home plug and play dream come true.

Abdallah Bushnaq from Ricoh will give an overview of how OSGi is used in printers. Interestingly, there are several printer manufacturers that have OSGi inside, for example Canon has an OSGi runtime that can be used to download print applications. I am curious how Ricoh will use this technology.

Industrial automation is one of my favorite application areas for OSGi. I think it is an almost perfect fit, especially because this market is less cost sensitive than consumer products. Daniel Grossmann, Research Assistant, Information Technology in Mechanical Engineering, will give a very interesting presentation of how OSGi technology can be used in the automation of very large plants like refineries. Roman Roelofsen (IONA) will discuss how Service Oriented Archictures also fit embedded systems, and OSGi Technology makes this straightforward.

Cross industry, there is the need for remote management. Joachim Ritter, ProSyst Software, will give a presentation how you can use OSGi Technology to manage large number of runtimes. A key component of remote management is the software repository. It is nice to have a framework that resolves bundles, but where do those bundles come from? Richard S. Hall will give a presentation about the OSGi Bundle Repository under the intriguing title: "The Bundle Dilemma."

And of course we have lots of sessions for the people that are busy with the technology itself. First we will give an overview of the state of the OSGi specifications. The chairs of the expert groups will present their progress: BJ Hargrave (IBM), Kai Hackbarth (Prosyst), and Eric Newcomer (IONA). There is lots of progress in the Enterprise group and the Requirements group at the moment. If you plan to use OSGi technology in the future, you better be there.

We have some very interesting lightning talks for OSGi developers. BJ Hargrave will elucidate the changes for v4.1. Maven, the Apache build tool, has been extended with OSGi support. Stuart McCulloch (Jayway Malaysia), will show how these tools can be used to create OSGi bundles. Ales Justin (JBoss) will tell about the work that JBoss is doing adapting their microkernel to support OSGi.

Services, extensions? Neil Bartlett, famous from the popular beginner tutorials. will give a talk comparing the Eclipse Extension Registry (which is a service!) with the OSGi Service Registry. These two concepts are quite close and still wildly different. Puzzled? Neil will make it crystal clear. And if you have decided for services, then you should not miss the talk of Clément Escoffier about iPOJO. He worked with Richard Hall to develop a next generation component model for OSGi. This project can be seen as the successor of Service Binder that was the basis for OSGi Declarative Services. Obviously, if you program for OSGi Technology you should not miss the OSGi best practices talk that BJ Hargrave and I are giving!

The day after the community event, Thursday the 28th, we will have EG meetings. The Enterprise Expert Group meeting will be for members only but there will also be a Remote Management and Automotive requirements gathering meeting presided by Kai Hackbarth. These two meetings are also open for non-members.

Really, if you are involved with OSGi technology you have very little excuse to not show up. There will be plenty of time to talk to the speakers and other participants. I really hope I will meet you there! If you register before the 12th, you still get the early bird discount.

Peter Kriens

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