OSGi Alliance @ JavaOne

This blog is terribly late due to a security issue at our provider that interfered with a spam filter on Gmail :-( Excuses.

The OSGi BOFs that we had organized were a complete success. The Thursday BOF attracted over a hundred people; this is incredibly successful considering that this BOF was at 8.30 PM while the “JavaOne After Dark Bash” was going on at the same time. The BOF started a bit scary because the organization had not setup the tables I had requested. Fortunately, we could steal some tables from the public space. We started with a presentation by BJ Hargrave. He was regularly interrupted with questions. Often he did not get a chance to answer the questions because someone in the audience did. This created a very interactive feeling, which worked well. After 20 minutes we asked the people to go to the demonstrations or get an OSGi T-Shirt. Though the T-Shirts won the popularity contest in the beginning, the demonstrations then won hands on. We had presentations from ProSyst, Siemens, Paremus, and Luminis. While all this was going on we presented a slide show of 240 slides (!) that consisted of presentations that I had received about OSGi related projects (Thanks all submitters!). In the end we had to be forcefully removed from the room for the next BOF.

The BOF on Wednesday, Component Programming was also quite successful. We attracted around 50 people, which at 10.30 PM and a million parties going on is amazing. I presented the introduction to the OSGi. Thomas Watson gave a presentation how Eclipse can be used to program components and Jeff McAffer talked about the Slug. We got lots of good questions and the feedback was very positive.

We also had lots of questions about the OSGi during the conference. I had made some nice shirts with “Ask me about OSGi” on the back and this generated the desired response. I also had printed stickers with this slogan and hand wrestled everybody that knew anything about the OSGi specifications to wear them. It was a bit awkward that there were actually a surprising number of people that had never heard of “OSGi”. Well, I guess there still is a lot of evangelizing to do.

Very positive are the reactions about OSGi and the enterprise. I have met many people that are extremely excited about OSGi technology being used with Spring and other enterprise technologies. I think the coming year will be very exciting with all the developments in this area. The OSGi Alliance really must organize a workshop on OSGi in the Enterprise soon.

From an OSGi Alliance point of view JavaOne was a great success!

The conference itself was, from my point of view, rather disappointing. It is big and it is monopolized by Sun; it was not easy to find a technical presentation by a non-Sun employee. I actually think I got a bit of a rash from too much sun exposure …

     Peter Kriens