OSGi R7 early spec drafts available

Recently OSGi published the first early draft for the OSGi R7. While not all specs aimed for R7 are present yet, a few new ones have appeared that can be checked out. The new ones are:

• Chapter 147 - Transaction Control Service. This specification provides an improved mechanism to perform work in a transaction scope. It provides a higher level of abstraction than the extising JTA integration specification, which makes it really easy to write transactional code, especially when using Java 8 lambdas.
• Chapter 148 - Converter. Convert anything into everything, and back. A universal object converter which can be used to convert simple values between datatypes, but it can also be used to convert complex structures such as maps or DTOs to interfaces or annotations. Previously functionality such as this was already supported in DS, which allows you to access a component's configuration map via an annotation. Now, this can be used anywhere you like...
• Chapter 706 - Push Streams. These provide a programming model similar to Java 8 pull-based streams, but then using a push model. Useful for data such as events that arrives asynchronously. The data can be mapped, buffered, splitted, filtered or otherwise processed before it gets sent to the receiver. 

You can find the R7 early drafts at the OSGi website here: https://www.osgi.org/developer/specifications/drafts/

Opensource implementations are already starting to appear, check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi_Specification_Implementations for where to obtain OSGi specification implementations.

As always, these are early drafts. Things will definitely change in some of the details. If you want to learn more about these and other upcoming OSGi specifications, come and visit the OSGi Community Event at EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg https://www.osgi.org/2016-osgi-community-event.