I am back ...

Since last week, I am back, working for the OSGi Alliance. To some this may come as a surprise but talking to people it seems that many actually had expected this.

So what happened? In the past year I've developed a repository (https://www.jpm4j.org) from scratch. Partly because I think such a repo is absolutely necessary, partly because I felt I needed to make an enterprise like app so I knew better what I was talking about. Both succeeded; What did not work out as hoped was commercializing it. I guess business aspects have never been my strongest point :-( and there is only so much I could spent on this sabbatical.

However, this was not the only aspect that made me return. Though I wanted to keep a distance of OSGi in the beginning I developed jpm with OSGi in the way that I've always have advocated: Services first. The good news was that to my great relief, this actually worked much better than I told people. I am now more convinced than ever that the OSGi service model is a true innovation that is highly undervalued in the industry. The bad news was that it required the development of too many basic components just to get started. Though there are an amazing number of libraries and bundles out there they often look awkward  because they do not leverage the unique advantages of OSGi: services + configuration admin. For me it became clear that the threshold to start with OSGi for a real web application was way too high.

After talking to some OSGi Alliance people we proposed to create a 'starter-kit' that would enable developers to start on a much higher level than a servlet. It should provide a foundation like a Ruby-on-Rails but now based on the much more scalable OSGi technology. On top of this foundation we plan to add a real application, demonstrating all the OSGi's best practices. This was proposed to the board and they actually wanted me to start weeks earlier than I had planned. So here I am!

I will therefore  be working on a foundation for OSGi web applications. If you have ideas, let me know. I am sure to keep you posted via this blog and twitter.

Peter Kriens