The Smell of Success

Today I got three different mails about Apache and OSGi. First someone proudly told me that Apache Derby was OSGi Ready! Yes, I knew for a ages! Derby was submitted to Apache by IBM. When inside IBM, they had made it available on SMF, their OSGi Framework implementation. Derby can now rightfully claim to be the first, stealth, OSGi beach head in the Apache Foundation.

In the beginning of this year, the Apache Directory project contacted Richard S. Hall and asked him if Oscar could become an Apache project. Enrique Rodriguez did much of the work in convincing the Apache board and Richard to follow the OSGi route. The transfer between Objectweb (Oscar’s previous home) and Apache was not completely smooth (I had to act as a virtual shoulder sometimes) but everything worked out in the end. Apache Felix is currently an incubator, but I hope they move it to a top level project soon. Looking at all the OSGi related activities in Apache it looks like it is becoming a crucial cornerstone.

So far this is history, but today I also learnt something new. I got a mail with a link to a blog: The Blockathon Report. It seems that Cocoon is also seriously considering bundleizing their work. From their web site: “Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development.” From that description, it seems that OSGi could provide a solid foundation. This made me curious of course, so I started to dig a bit to see if more projects were adopting OSGi. I found that Velocity, a template expansion language for web servers was also bundleized. Velocity seems to be derived from Webmacros, a template engine that I really enjoyed working with a couple of years ago. The OSGi version does not seem to be in the latest 1.4 revision, but I guess it will be there soon. In another blog I read that the James project is also considering OSGi. James is a mail server.

But the biggest surprise was when (also today) I got a mail that showed that the Apache Harmony project is considering the the OSGi Framework. The Harmony project is attempting to develop a Java VM with an Apache License (cool!). The idea that was expressed in the mail is to use the OSGi modularity layer in the VM, and deliver the core VM with the OSGi Minimum Execution Environment. This allows the JVM to bootstrap an OSGi Framework. The modularity and lifecycle layer can then be used to add additional APIs as desired. No more profiles that are always too much or too little, every deployment can decide what APIs are necessary. It is even possible to download APIs only when they are needed. That is the way J2SE should be delivered.

All this is really exciting for someone that recently watched the baby-steps of the OSGi Alliance. I think that the popularity of the OSGi specifications will continue to rise. We will face some interesting times, for example, will we be able to control the developments of new service interfaces? Apache, Eclipse, are vibrant organizations that will soon discover that it is cool to develop service specifications. It will be interesting to see if the OSGi can remain the focus point for the standardization of these services. For the sake of the industry, it would be best if we could share these interface definitions.
Well, did I forget any Apache projects that adopt OSGi? Let me know!
Hope to see many of you next week on ApacheCon 2005.