An evening of OSGi with BGJUG on April 17 Sofia, Bulgaria

The BGJUG and Software AG are kindly hosting an Evening of OSGi on Tuesday April 17 from 7pm.

The OSGi Alliance is in Sofia conducting its Expert Group face to face meetings and Board meeting so this evening event will provide an excellent opportunity to meet with the local Java community while we are in town.

There are two talks lined up from the OSGi Alliance:

• the first is an 'Introduction to OSGi' by BJ Hargrave (OSGi Alliance CTO) and 
• the second is a look at 'How OSGi Alliance specifications have influenced the IoT market' by Pavlin Dobrev & Kai Hackbath (Bosch). 

In addition Todor Boev from Software AG will be presenting 'OSGi and JPMS in practice' which will discuss Software AG's experiences with OSGi and Jigsaw/JPMS now that Java 9 is released.

The event is being held at Sofia Tech Park / Incubator building, Tsarigradsko shoes 111B, 1784 Sofia [MAP].

Please be sure to register in advance to secure your place.

Thanks to BGJUG and Software AG for their assistance in arranging this event and of course to the speakers for their support.

We hope you can join us.

Using OSGi to Connect Things with IoT Applications - Member Webinar

Anyone using OSGi for IoT or interested in learning more about how OSGi and specifically Gateways powered by OSGi can be used to deliver joined up IoT solutions should find the 30 minute Bosch Webinar on Aug 29, 2017 at 1pm CDT of interest.

Titled "Connecting things with IoT applications - How gateways can build the bridge", Bosch Software Innovations have lots of real world experience with many millions of OSGi based gateways out in the field supporting everyday solutions that users and customers just take for granted.

Attendees of the webinar will learn about the important role OSGi has in the delivery of these stable, evolvable and easily maintainable IoT gateway solutions. Furthermore you will gain an understanding of:

• The pros and cons of gateway- and non-gateway-based IoT solutions
• Benefits of using gateways as mediators between devices and IoT applications
• Real-world use cases for gateway-based IoT solutions
• The role of OSGi in connectivity projects

You can find out more and register to attend the live webinar or receive access to the post event recording by visiting the event website.

OSGi Community Event 2017 CFP

"cirkus corker announcer” by

Fredrik Rubensson

is licensed under CC BY_SA 2.0.

The OSGi Community Event Program Committee is pleased to announce that the Call For Papers (CFP) for the 2017 event is NOW OPEN.

We are looking for submissions from anyone who has something to share about OSGi technology, the OSGi ecosystem or OSGi community.  All successful submissions receive a free speaker all access pass to the OSGi Community Event and EclipseCon Europe.

Popular topics often include use cases and case studies of using OSGi, OSGi open source projects or commercial OSGi products where you have some experience to share. Presentations on tools and frameworks that can improve the developer experience are also well received.  We are also looking for a 3-hour tutorial, so if you have a project or some examples on an OSGi specification where the audience can participate with you then we would welcome your submissions.

Click here to Submit a talk

OSGi is used in many different environments and markets and we are interested in hearing from your use in any of them, be it enterprise, telecommunications, transport, retail, IoT, Industry 4.0, M2M, Cloud, or Smart Home, to name just a few.

It's always great to get submissions from new members to the community and/or new speakers so please don't be shy and get your submissions in.  Whether what you have to share is small or large, state-of-the-art or traditional, business critical or a pet project, we want to hear from you.

Your submission should be either for a 35-minute talk or a 3-hour tutorial. 

We are sharing the submission system with EclipseCon Europe so please be sure to select OSGi as the track when making your submission to be sure the OSGi Program Committee will get to review your proposal.

The CFP is open until July 17, however the Early Bird submission deadline is June 30.

As an added incentive to get your submissions in for the Early Bird deadline we will award a €50 Amazon Voucher to the talk selected for the OSGi Early Bird pick. Be sure to submit by June 30 to be in with a chance of winning this.

The OSGi Community Event 2017 will be taking place between October 24 to 26.  Once again this year the event is being held at the Forum am Schlosspark in Ludwigsburg, Germany.  As always there will be plenty of talks, BOFs, social events, beer, wine and food so make sure you have the dates in diary and start planning your travel and accommodation early.

If you have any questions please contact us by email.

Come and see Christer Larsson at IoT Tech Expo in Berlin, 1-2 June

Christer Larsson, OSGi Alliance vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa, will participate in a panel at the co-located event series: IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo and AI Expo in Berlin 1-2^nd June. The event series will also host 200+ speakers sharing their use cases, attracting C-Level execs from across the board. 

There is just one week left to register for an all-access pass at the discounted rate as prices will go up on the 19^th May. The Ultimate Pass will give you access to all 10 conferences, the expo, copies of session materials in addition to the messenger tool and an invitation to the networking party on day one.

You can also save an additional 20% discount on your pass using the discount code OSGi20 during registration. 

Christer will participate in Developing for the IoT – Friday 2^nd June 2017

10:50AM Panel: Creating a standards framework for IoT

• What does the concept of standards really mean in the context of IoT?
• How can the varied standards relevant to the area effectively be integrated for IoT solutions?
• Can a verticalized approach to standards work?

For more information on the event, visit https://www.iottechexpo.com/europe/why-attend/. 

OSGi at CeBIT 2017

The OSGi Alliance is pleased to be returning to CeBIT again this year between Monday March 20 to Friday March 24.

We will be showcasing the popular OSGi IoT Demo which uses a number of different OSGi open source projects, and commercial products from OSGi Alliance members (Bosch, Eclipse, Eurotech, imec, Makewave, Paremus and Skelmir) to manage and control the operation of LEGO^® trains. This really is a great example of the interoperability of the OSGi specifications and demonstration of how an IoT ecosystem can be created using OSGi technology.

You can find us on Stand C62 in the IoT / M2M Pavilion located in Hall 12 [Map].

Be sure to stop by and say hello . You will also be able to find out more about what we are doing in the demo and broader OSGi activities. You can also take the opportunity to interact with the sensors and RFID tags in the demo to see the affect they have on the LEGO^® trains running around the track.

A number of the OSGi IoT and Enterprise Expert Group members will be on hand to answer any questions you may have about OSGi and its use in IoT and also Enterprise and Cloud.  We would also be pleased to discuss with you about how you can get involved and contribute to new specifications and also join the OSGi Alliance.

IoT Expert Conference Keynote Presentation

Kai Hackbarth, from Bosch, an OSGi Alliance Board Member, will be making a keynote presentation on behalf of the OSGi Alliance on Thursday March 23 at 1.40pm.

 'How OSGi can help to build open IoT ecosystems ?"

IoT is already revolutionising our lives at home, in the car, at work and many other places. With predictions of 20+ billion devices and beyond the IoT impact has only just begun. To support this phenomenal growth and change whats needed is an open modular and service based platform that can support an evolving and dynamic ecosystem. We will look at how OSGi specifications make this a reality, and explore use cases that prove its deliverable today. Further details are available online.

Complimentary Tickets to CeBIT

If you would like to attend CeBIT, and (of course) come and see us or watch the OSGi Keynote we have some complimentary tickets available.  Please contact the OSGi marketing team to request your ticket.

Hope to see you in Hanover March 20 to 24.

OSGi and IoT in Berlin March 15-16

Interested in OSGi? Interested in IoT? Then read on.....

Bosch is holding two events in Berlin between March 15 to 16 this year and you can join them to find out more about their IoT activities and get involved with some of their OSGi IoT solutions in the Connected Manufacturing Hack Challenge.

Bosch ConnectedExperience 2017 featuring the IoT Hackathon and Connected Manufacturing Hack Challenge is taking place from 15 to 16 March with a pre-meeting from 18.30hrs on 14 March.

As one of over 500 developers attending the ConnectedExperience you will get the opportunity to take part in four IoT Hack Hhallenges (Connected Mobility, Connected Manufacturing, Connected Building & City and Open Hack Challenge). You can find more information about the event and how to register at http://bcw.bosch-si.com/berlin/hackathon.

Bosch ConnectedWorld 2017 conference is taking place from 15 to 16 March offering more than 150 speakers across 5 stages with a mixture of keynotes, break out sessions, demos and case studies. This is a business conference focused on IoT. You can find out more about the conference agenda and how to register at http://bcw.bosch-si.com/berlin/conference.

OSGi Alliance members should contact Kai Hackbath who can provide special access codes to secure you a free spot at the Hackathon or a discount for the conference ticket.

See OSGi Alliance at Smart Summit London Next Week

Smart Summit London is taking place Sept 21-22 at the Olympia Conference Centre in London.

The conference is made up of three tracks and a join networking exhibition.  The tracks will have in-depth information focused on Smart Home, Smart Cities and Industrial IoT.

The OSGi Alliance will be represented by Christer Larsson (OSGi Alliance VP of EMEA) and Tim Ward (OSGi Alliance Co-chair of the IoT Expert Group ) who will be taking parr in the conferences.

The conference has two packed days with over 160 leading speakers and is expecting over 700 attendees.

Exhibit only passes are available for free, there is a charge for conference passes. The OSGi Alliance has a number of 20% discount codes available for the conference.  If you are interested in receiving one of these please contact us by email.

Also be sure to let us know by email if you are going to be attending the conference and would like to meet with Christer, Tim or any of the other OSGi Alliance members who will be there.

You can find out more about the event and how to register for the exhibits or the conference on the Smart Summit London website.

OSGi CFP Closes July 18

The Call For Papers for the OSGi Community Event 2016 is due to close on Monday July 18.

Yes, thats Monday next week, so you don't have long left to get your submissions in. We are interested in talks and tutorials on all things OSGi - technical presentations, use cases, success stories, lessons learnt, you name it.

Click here to Submit a talk now

This is the largest OSGi event of the year so its a great conference to talk at and attend.  We will have more than 2 full tracks, a tutorial, BOF's, an OSGi IoT Demo and lots of opportunity to meet with your peers over presentations, the exhibitions, excellent entertainment and of course beers and food. 

Thanks to everyone that has made a submission already, we had a great response for the Early Bird deadline of the end of last month.

Thanks also to Bosch for their Elite Dual EclipseCon Europe and OSGi Community Event Sponsorship.  Their support is much appreciated.


If you are interested in exploring sponsorship opportunities for the conference and event you can find out more information and access the sponsorship prospectus from here.

We are pleased that the OSGi Community Event is being co-located with EclipseCon Europe again this year and it will take place October 25 to 27 in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

The Early Bird talk selected is "OSGi on High Speed Trains in Germany" by Roland Ndaka Fru from Yaka5 GmbH. You can find the full abstract of the talk here.  This should be a great talk on how OSGi is delivering value in a real world business scenario we can all relate to.

The OSGi Keynote - "OSGi/Java in Industrial IoT: More than a solid trend — essential to scale into the world of Internet connected things" from Robert Andres at Eurotech Group, will also include a use case from Hitachi High Technologies by Water Hofmann discussing their predicative maintenance solution which is based on OSGi, courtesy of the Eurotech products that they use.

Registration is open and you can get the best prices booking before October 4. And don't forget OSGi Alliance members get an extra discount on registration.  Please visit the EclipseCon Europe registration page for pricing information and to sign up.

The OSGi Community Event Program Committee are Looking forward to reading and reviewing your talk and tutorial submissions.

If you have any questions please contact the Program Committee via email.

IoT Week Belgrade - May 31 - June 2, 2016

IoT Week Belgrade is taking place next week from May 31 to June 2 and we are pleased to be a partner of this event that has representatives from industry and academia from across the globe.

Kai Hackbath, from ProSyst / Bosch, and the Co-Chair of the OSGi Residential Expert Group, will be making a Keynote presentation on:

Is Industrial IoT a disruptive innovation in manufacturing?

The 3 day conference will cover IoT topics from a business and research perspective.  Key areas being discussed include:

• Smart cities
• Agriculture
• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Privacy Protection

You can find further details and register for the conference at http://iot-week.eu.

Users' Forum Meeting in Berlin - April 27

The OSGi Users' Forum Germany are holding a meeting on 27 April, 2016 in Berlin at the Bosch Software Innovations training centre.

The meeting will take place between 10.00 hrs and 17.00 hrs and has a focus on OSGi and IoT.

Thanks to Bosch Software Innovations for their support by hosting the meeting.

Registration is required. Full details and the agenda are available (in German) on the event home page.

OSGi @ CeBIT 2016 - March 14 to 18, Hannover

20 Complimentary Tickets Available

 Please Read On to Find out How to Request One

The OSGi Alliance is pleased to announce that we will be at CeBIT computer expo in Hannover, Germany next week from March 14 to 18. You will be able to find us in the IoT Solutions Eurotech & Partner space on stand E77 in Hall13 (see the press release).

Thanks to the support of OSGi Alliance member Eurotech and the CeBIT organizers the OSGi Alliance will be running an OSGi IoT demo and also presenting at the conference.

OSGi IoT Demo @ CeBIT

The OSGi IoT demo will be using LEGO®️ trains to show how simple it is to build, interoperate, run and change live services running in edge devices, gateways and the cloud using OSGi and OSGi enRoute. The seamless interoperation of open source projects and commercial products in the demo delivers an extensible and evolvable standards-based OSGi IoT solution.

The CeBIT demo is an extension of the 2015 Community Event demo with the inclusion of Eclipse Kura, Eurotech DynaCOR and Eurotech ReliaGATE 10-20 gateways. The demo will now allow stand visitors to interact with sensors that affect the trains' behavior.

You can find us and the demo in the IoT Solutions Eurotech & Partner space on stand E77 in Hall 13.  There will be a number of other real word OSGi based IoT solutions on show in this space too from Eurotech partners and customers. These include analytics and predictive maintenance from Hitachi High-Tech Europe, industrial PLC integration, smart energy from Misurio Ltd., managed PDU from Om7Sense, facility management/retail from FSI Ltd., people counting, and smart city/environmental monitoring.

Please be sure to stop by stand E77 to see all the OSGi demos.

Thanks to the following OSGi Alliance contributors and members for making the OSGi IoT LEGO®️ train demo happen at CeBIT:

OSGi Presentation @ CeBIT

Board member, and former president, Richard Nicholson will be representing the OSGi Alliance and presenting “Business and IoT - Economic Alchemy or Another Anticlimax ?” on Tuesday, March 15, at 1:30 p.m in Hall 13 at stand E48.  His presentation will review the fundamental characteristics required for any pervasive IoT solution to transform markets and businesses, and he will discuss the central importance of an industry standard for software modularity.

This presentation is part of the CeBIT Communication and IoT SOLUTIONS Forum.

Interested in a Complimentary Ticket to CeBIT 2016?

The OSGi Alliance has 20 Complimentary Tickets available for attendance at CeBIT 2016 next week.  These will be provided on a 'first come, first served' basis.  To request a ticket please send an email to us providing your name, company name (if applicable) and your home country.

We will then provide you with a dedicated url for you to register for your complimentary CeBIT ticket online.

We hope to see you in Hannover next week.

Building the IoT with OSGi - Jaxenter

There is a great article published earlier this week in Jaxenter talking about the important role that OSGi has to play in IoT.  The article is by Tim Verbelen from iMinds. Tim is an invited contributor at the OSGi Alliance.

Tim discusses how the OSGi service model offers an elegant and easy way to deal with the challenges presented by the sheer volume of different devices, APIs and protocols, and the different lifecycle requirements that they all have.

The big improvements in OSGi tooling from Bndtools and OSGi enRoute are also covered.  If you haven't checked these out for yourself then they are definitely worth a look.

The article goes on to look at a Smart Home Dashboard case study that Tim has been working on with his colleagues at iMinds.

And to emphasise the concluding point - you can get involved with the OSGi IoT Expert Group to help define and deliver the specifications to further improve the IoT experience and ensure that the interfaces to all of these devices are interoperable.

OSGi IoT Developer Hack Challenge with Bosch

OSGi Alliance Strategic Member, Bosch, is organising a Hack Challenge for developers that will include the opportunity to experiment with OSGi technology to implement industrial IoT solutions for the Bosch Power Tool range of products.

The Hack Challenge is free to attend and participate and it will take place at the Bosch ConnectedExperience event which is being held at Café Moskau, in Berlin between March 8 to 9, 2016.

To participate developers should register online.

Developers who attend the Connected Power Tools Hack Challenge will get the opportunity to work with the most advanced Power Tools from Bosch Rexroth as well as additional equipment to solve real world problems. These challenges include locating tools, supporting the worker in using these advanced tools, and building new sales and maintenance services for the users. The Bosch IoT Suite, which includes the ProSyst mBS OSGi Framework, can be used to build new and disruptive IoT applications in this area.

For further information please see the Hack Challenge website or contact Kai Hackbath from ProSyst (Bosch).

Good luck!

Functional Modularity - Building Better APIs for the OSGi Ecosystem

Introduction

One of the new RFCs (RFC 216) being discussed in the Enterprise Expert Group is called PushStreams and is all about stream processing. I’m leading the RFC and whilst a final specification is still a way off, the open processes at the OSGi Alliance mean that people (including me) have already been talking publicly about this RFC.

My talk about PushStreams at the OSGi Community Event was well attended, and feedback on it led me to write a blog post about why we need PushStreams. Since then there have been even more questions, including a few about the design of the API and the theory behind it. I thought therefore I should talk a little about the reasoning behind the APIs from some OSGi specifications that I've worked on in the last few years.

Functional Programming at the OSGi Alliance

The OSGi framework is a module system for Java, and Java is inherently Object Oriented in its approach. Given that this is the case why is OSGi starting to define APIs with a more functional usage pattern? In fact OSGi is far from alone here, Open Source Projects, and even Java itself, are building more functional concepts into the libraries that we all use.

The reasons for this change are varied, but in general functional concepts are introduced to solve problems in a simpler way than is possible using Object Oriented programming techniques. OO programming provides a lot of benefits, but as systems become more distributed, more highly parallel, and more asynchronous they become much harder to manage and to reason about.

OSGi as a technology is used across a huge range of sectors, and across many layers of the technology stack. OSGi is used in embedded software, such as car entertainment systems and home gateways; it is used in desktop applications, such as Eclipse RCP apps; and it is used in server runtimes, such as Java EE application servers and distributed cloud runtimes.

In order to support such a large ecosystem it is vital that OSGi continues to evolve to better match the areas it is used. To better support distributed server platforms the OSGi compendium release 6 included Promises and the Async Service. The addition of PushStreams will help to support new use cases from IoT, where event filtering, forwarding, and aggregation are vital parts of allowing systems to work in the real world.

For those of you already familiar with functional programming, you will notice that the PushEventSource and PushEventConsumer are an example of an Enumerator and an Iteratee. Once a basic implementation is available I’ll put together some examples showing just how much they can simplify processing a stream of events.