Friday, September 13, 2013

Babysteps, the RFP for the Application Framework

The first step official step is set for the OSGi Application Framework! In the past weeks I've followed the OSGi Process and written a Request for Proposal (RFP). last week we discussed this in lovely southern England at the IBM's Hursley premises. Since the OSGi Alliance recently made the specification process fully open, this RFP is publicly available

At the combined CPEG/EEG/REG meeting yesterday I spent almost 4 hours mostly talking about this. I first demonstrated the system I developed last year and then and segued into lessons learned. Since this was my 'sabbatical' I could do something that is a lot harder when you work for a company. I developed this system from the ground up to be a no-compromise µservice based system. This was fun and proved that µservices work as advertised for real life applications. However, this work also made me aware how hard it is to find the right components for your system. Though popular open source projects have adopted the OSGi headers (thank you! You know who you are.), few projects actually support the µservice model as it was intended. I was therefore forced to develop a lot of base components that just should have been widely available. And even if those components would have been there, there is actually too little information about how to architect an OSGi system.

After I had bored everybody for 2.5 hours we went to the RFP. The RFP is very ambitions (and quite large for an RFP). It outlines the scope, which is much, much, bigger than we can do in a short time. We will actually try provide developers with a complete solution, integrating many best practices. Ambitious, and it will take time, but it is supposed to guide us in the coming years when we work on this project. 

I'd love to get feedback and since this RFP is public you can now actually read while it will progress through the organization. So please read it and let me know. You can either react on the blog, mail me, or create issues on the OSGi Bugzilla

Peter Kriens



1 comment:

  1. Indeed, this is a good news. I have been thinking on similar lines for a long time after experiencing the difficulties in current OSGi. I even thought of starting a project on Github, and gather people around this concept. But coming directly from OSGi is a welcome initiative. And I will fully support and contribute to this. Please provide more updates as this progresses.

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