OSGi BundleFest

We are now three days in the BundleFest and the spirits are still high after all the long hours of work put in. The group is pretty much settled in and we all know the routine. We start at 9 am (though the first walk in around 8 am). The first thing we do is have a meeting where we report where we are, what we want to do, and any road blocks. This is supposed to be a general (short) meeting but this morning I had to switch off the network, which I could easily do because my mac provides the routing functionality. However, it costed me some serious points with some of the attendents.

We then work until around 11 for coffee. It is intersting to see how smal groups form and people work together and then continue working highly concentrated. It is a perfect forum to learn, every time I sit next to a person I learn new shortcuts in Eclipse. Though Roman Roelofsen (ProSyst) gave me a hard time because he typed faster than I could read.

Today I worked mostly on bnd, it had a rather nasty bug that it got confused when the Elipse workspace differed from the bnd workspace. Anyway, with Tim Diekmann's (TIBCO) and Victor Ransmayr help I figured out the problem and after that the solution was easy. It is amazing how many easy to invalidate assumptions one makes in code.

I almost missed lunch (which is excellent here) because I had to pick up Andreas Kraft (Deutsche Telekom) from the airport while dropping off Sergey Beryozkin (IONA), but the airport is so close that some fries and mussels were left (not many though!).

In the afternoon we had an interesting discussion about the TCK for RFC 119 distributed computing. Should this TCK test for real distribution (i.e. between VMs or even machines), or do we only have to test the assertions that are mentioned in the specification. This was quite a heated discussion that was loudly continued over tea.

I even get some help with the older TCKs. By moving the OSGi build on bnd we had the problem that all the test cases need to be redone. OSGi test cases are quite complicated because they have to install and install hundreds of bundles. In our build, we have about a 110 projects but we generate over 900 bundles, many of those bundles are embedded. Stoyan Boshev (ProSyst) actually is moving along very fast through one of the most complicated test suites we have now. I am happy I do not have to move that one, though it means he pushes me hard to get the functionality in the OSGi build right.

Probably the coolest thing about this meeting is that you can shout a question and there are three people that have a well-informed opinion and sometimes factual information. For me it is sometimes a bit getting used to, because most of my time I spent my time working alone, having so many people around is overwhelming sometimes. But it is fun.

The worst thing, for me, is the food. This place is having copious lunches that are of excellent quality but contain way too many calories. Oh well, next week no food I guess :-(

Well, off to the next item ...

Peter Kriens