OSGi R7 Highlights: Proposed Final Draft Now Available

I am pleased to announce that the OSGi Alliance has published the Proposed Final Drafts of the OSGi Core R7 and Compendium R7 specifications. We expect that the final versions of these specifications will be published in April 2018 after OSGi Alliance member approval.

The R7 release builds upon the long history of the OSGi Alliance’s leadership in Java modularity and reflects a significant amount of effort from the technical members of the OSGi Alliance expert groups over the last 2 years. Thanks go to all of the members who have contributed to this release.

R7 represents many significant new features and capabilities and provides an open standards-based approach for a number of modern valuable and simple-to-use technologies important to Java developers.

This blog post is the start of a series of blog posts from the technical experts at the OSGi Alliance to share some of the key highlights of R7. The blog posts in this series will come out over the coming weeks and cover the following topics:

• Java 9 Support – Multi-release JAR support and runtime discovery of the packages provided by the JPMS modules loaded by the platform.
• Declarative Services – Constructor injection and component property types.
• JAX-RS – A whiteboard model for building JAX-RS microservices.
• Converter – A package for object type conversion.
• Cluster Information – Support for using OSGi frameworks in clustered environments.
• Transaction Control – An OSGi model for transaction life cycle management.
• Http Whiteboard – Updates to the Http Whiteboard model.
• Push Streams and Promises – The Promises packages is updated with new methods and an improved implementation and the new Push Streams package provides a stream programming model for asynchronously arriving events.
• Configurator and Configuration Admin – Configuration Admin is updated to support the new Configurator specification for delivering configuration data in bundles.
• LogService – A new logging API is added which supports logging levels and dynamic logging administration and a new Push Stream-based means of receiving log entries is also added.
• Bundle Annotations – Annotations that allow the developer to inform tooling on how to build bundles.
• CDI – Context and Dependency Injection support for OSGi developers.

Stay tuned and I hope you find the technical information in the blog post series useful to you as developers!

Join Us for OSGi in Ghent - Weds, Sept 20, 2017

The OSGi Alliance is holding its next technical Expert Group meetings in Ghent later this month.

On Weds, Sept 20, 2017 you can join us for an evening of OSGi. Organised in collaboration with BeJUG.

Registration is required as places are limited so be sure to sign up on the BeJUG meetup event page.

ACA-IT Solutions are kindly hosting the event and providing sandwiches while everyone assembles from 18.30 hrs.  And then the evening kicks off with a welcome from 19.00hrs.

The agenda for the rest of the evening is:

• 19.10 hrs - What's coming in the OSGi R7 Specification (David Bosschaert & Carsten Ziegeler)
• 19.50 hrs - OSGi Push Streams, scalable event processing - pushing the limits (Tim Ward)
• 20.30 hrs - OSGi; from amateur to invited contributor (Tim Verbelen)

There will also be opportunity to network and ask questions with your peers and OSGi Expert Group members.

The event is being held at ACA-IT Solutions Ghent office (Voorhavenlaan, 31/008, Ghent). ACA have been actively using OSGi for many years and support the community by committing to open source OSGi projects. Thanks also to BeJUG for their support in promoting the event.

We hope you can join us. Don't forget to REGISTER in advance.

An Evening of OSGi - Stockholm, Sweden - Tues, 27 June

The OSGi Alliance are holding their next Expert Group technical meetings in Stockholm at the end of this month.

Jforum has kindly arranged 'An Evening of OSGi' while the technical experts are in town. This is taking place on Tuesday 27 June, 2017.

Registration starts from 5.15pm and there will be some snacks and drinks available.

Mattias, Joakim & Victor from Jforum Stockholm will welcome everyone and then hand over to Christer Larsson (VP EMEA OSGi Alliance & CEO Makewave) to introduce the evening and explain the historical links of OSGi to Sweden! before moving on to the main program:

• Short introduction to the OSGi Technology - BJ Hargrave
• OSGi Push streams, scalable event processing - pushing the limits - Tim Ward
• What's coming in OSGi R7 - Carsten Ziegeler & David Bosschaert

Registration is essential.  You can find out more information and register at goo.gl/xDdJnY. 

We hope to see you there.