First book on OSGi at JAX 2008!

Last evening I got back from a very pleasant trip to JAX 2008 in Wiesbaden. I was asked to give the best practice and the OSGi modularity presentations. Rod Johnson had already warmed the audience for OSGi with the result that we had to close the room when people where sitting, crawling, and standing everywhere even though there were still 40-50 people standing outside. Good news for OSGi, but I had to give the presentation for a second time that evening at 21.15, where I was surprised that there were still 50-60 people present that late in the evening. The next day was even better because I got a much bigger room that was also filled. Feels good after gotten used to preaching to audiences of 10 people for so many years.

I also got handed a copy of the first official OSGi book in the world. The book, written by Gerd Wütherich, Matthias Lübken, Nils Hartmann, and Bernd Kolb.

This is a thorough book on OSGi (though Equinox biased) that I recommend to anyone who is using OSGi or wants to know more about it. You can buy it at d.punkt. I hope they translate it in English soon. I already read most of the text during my Christmas vacation to help them with a review. Gerd had already shown me on the first day the thank you section. They had been really nice, and made the thank you in Dutch! Great work! It is great to finally being able to point to a good OSGi book.

JAX is a great conference, very well organized. Well, there is so much to do that I'll keep it short. Though there is one observation, unrelated to OSGi, I can't help myself making. On the way back with Ryan Air I observed that people can be incredibly rude at jumping the queue, and not just the one that look like it, even elegantly looking older people showed an incredible rudeness. Though I admire Ryan Air for many things, their queue management is non existent, seeming to call out the worst behavior in people. I figured people behaved so badly so that to get the best seats in the plane. However, when I boarded at the end of the queue the emergency seats in the middle were still mostly free. So why are people so much in a hurry that they are jumping the queue? One day I have to debug this, but now back to the build!

Peter Kriens

P.S. Talking about books, you can now also order the specification (core + compendium) in printed form for a special price.