Draft OSGi Enterprise R6 specification available

The OSGi Enterprise Expert Group has released a draft of the upcoming OSGi Enterprise R6 specification. You can find the following updates in the download package:

• The new Asynchronous Services specification has been added which allows clients to invoke OSGi services in an asynchronous way.
• A Promises API specification has been added. Promises are a very popular programming model in the Javascript world, where they make it easy to work with operations that execute in an asynchronous way. OSGi Promises follow a similar pattern. They are used by the Asynchronous Services specification, but can also be used independently.
• A new specification on Framework management via REST has been added. This facilitates remote framework management in cloud and other contexts where REST is the protocol of choice.
• A number of updates are made to the Remote Service Admin specification. RSA now supports remote endpoint modification notifications through new modification events. This means that if you update the service properties on a remoted services, this will no longer appear to clients as if the service was removed and then re-added. With the new modified event a previously remoted service will remain, and is updated in place.
• Subsystems have been updated to version 1.1, a number of changes have been made to this specification including the ability to provide the Deployment Manifest separate to the subsystem archive.
• The Repository spec has been updated to version 1.1, allowing more complex queries to be passed to the Repository.
• A new HTTP Whiteboard specification is being worked on. This specification brings Servlet support up to Servlet 3.x and adds whiteboard-based Servlet and Filter registration.
• Declarative Services is receiving an update which adds a new and really convenient way to work with Configuration, support for Prototype Service Factory (which is introduced in Core R6) and an introspective API.
• The MetaType service is being extended with annotations.

You can download the draft specification from the OSGi website on this location. Note that the zip file contains the draft spec, as well as three RFCs for which no spec chapter is ready yet, these will also be included in the final specification.

Also released this week, the Core Platform R6 final specification. Get it here.

OSGi EEG co-chairs,
David Bosschaert
Tim Diekmann