Thursday, August 8, 2013

OSGi RFPs and RFCs now accessible live to everyone

The bulk of the work done in the OSGi Alliance is around the creation of specifications. There are the OSGi Core specifications, which define the Framework itself, the Residential specifications which focus on the Residential and embedded context and the Enterprise specifications that define Service APIs and programming models for Enterprise systems. Every OSGi specification is developed in an RFC document in one of the OSGi expert groups: CPEG, REG or EEG. Before an RFC is developed however the requirements are gathered in an RFP, which is also discussed in one of the EGs.
Interesting is that there is a lot of cross-pollination happening. For example, work done in the EEG is often applicable to the residential context as well and vice-versa. And the nice thing about the work done in the EGs is that it's really all quite democratic and consensus oriented. No single company or organization dominates the decisions.

One thing that was really missing here was the general visibility of all the work happening on the RFPs and RFCs. The OSGi Alliance published Early Access Drafts at certain points in time, but this provided no live visibility on how the specifications were taking shape.

This has now been changed. From now on technical work done by the OSGi Alliance on RFPs and RFCs is visible live in the OSGi design repository at Github: https://github.com/osgi/design
This is great news for people who want to implement a spec that is still in development, for people who want to follow the specification process in general or simply for people who want to comment on or otherwise reference an active OSGi RFP or RFC!
And if you have any feedback, this can be provided through the usual feedback channels: the OSGi Bugzilla system.

For more background see also the press release.

And to get an idea on what OSGi is currently working on, here's the current list of the active documents as available via Github (click on the link to download):

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