Get help adding OSGi metadata to your Jars!

More and more Java projects are adding OSGi metadata to their Jar files. The benefits are clear, if you add OSGi metadata your Jar can also be used in the OSGi modular environment and be an OSGi Bundle. In many cases an ordinary Java Jar file can be an OSGi Bundle at the same time, if the appropriate OSGi metadata is added to its manifest.

So what does OSGi metadata look like? OSGi metadata is simply a number of extra headers in the Jar's META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file. While quite a large number of OSGi headers exist, the following would typically be the ones that you'd find in a library Jar file that provides OSGi metadata.
Bundle-ManifestVersion: 2
Bundle-SymbolicName: org.acme.mybundle
Bundle-Version: 1.4.1
Export-Package: org.acme.mycomponent;version="1.1.6";uses:="org.acme.tools"
Import-Package: org.acme.tools;version="[1.1, 2)"

Adding OSGi metadata to your project's Jar files can increase its user base, as OSGi-based projects can now also use it. However for some projects this might be a bit of a challenge, as not everyone is entirely familiar with the OSGi headers and especially properly versioning your bundles and packages requires some thought.

From today there is a new facility available to get help around OSGi metadata. If you are thinking of adding OSGi headers to your project but are unsure about the metadata, you can ask the OSGi community for help.

How to get help?
The OSGi bugzilla system now has a new 'product' called Metadata Advice. Anyone who is looking for help around OSGi metadata for their project can create a bug with their question at http://www.osgi.org/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi

Metadata Advice is open to everyone who needs some help. There is no need to be an OSGi Alliance member. The nice thing about using Bugzilla for this is that each bug effectively gets its own associated mailing list.

This is a community-based system, help is provided on a voluteer basis. So if you are knowledgeable about OSGi, feel free to sign up for receiving help requests. To do this go to the Bugzilla 'Email Preferences' and watch a user called metadata.advice-inbox@www.osgi.org

When watching this user you will get notified when new requests for metadata help come in.

So - when in doubt about your OSGi metadata, create that bug and share your question with the community!
Already know all about OSGi? Then sign up to watch metadata.advice-inbox@www.osgi.org and help others with their metadata...

Happy New Year!

Register by Dec 31 to Save for OSGi DevCon 2013

The preparations for OSGi DevCon 2013 are well underway. Its taking place in less than 3 months between March 25 to 28, 2013 in Boston.

• The schedule has been selected. [Talks] [Tutorials]
• Registration is open.
• Hotel reservations are open.

It is set to be an excellent event with a packed OSGi Program of 17 talks, 2 tutorials, a BOF and a Workshop over the 4 days. All attendees also get access to all of the EclipseCon 2013 sessions.

With a 40% reduction in registration fees compared with last year there has never been a better time to feast on the huge Smörgåsbord of content for learning new things and brushing up your skills. Not to forget the opportunity to network with your peers and many of the OSGi experts from around the world.

There are only a few days left to secure the best price for attending as the Early Bird price of $800 expires on New Years Eve.  And if you are an OSGi member you can benefit from an additional $100 saving.

So why delay? Sign up today and secure you place to join us for one of the key OSGi events of next year.

If you have any questions you can reach the Program Committee by email.

Happy Holidays.

OSGi DevCon 2013 Program Committee
BJ Hargrave & Mike Francis

The Growing OSGi Ecosystem

Let’s step back for a second to look at OSGi, the big picture. We’re all so busy facing both everyday and strategic challenges that we don’t always see how many we are, how much OSGi is being deployed and, as a result, how much the OSGi ecosystem is growing.

Industry conferences are an excellent illustration of ecosystem growth and OSGi value.

We just wrapped the OSGi Community Event 2012 last quarter.  The buzz around OSGi was very visible. The event was co-located with EclipseCon Europe and some talks drew 80 attendees, a healthy snapshot of the OSGi ecosystem.  The OSGi keynote by John Duimovich from IBM showed just how well-known OSGi technology is and how it is deployed in other communities. It was exciting to see business deployments, such as the QIVICON solution from Deutsche Telekom or Cisco’s product solution, not only show the benefits of OSGi technology, but also attract additional market players to become solution partners and, accordingly, grow the ecosystem. Also, the technical presentations received positive feedback and covered a range of markets, from enterprise, cloud, and embedded topics to native OSGi. An engaged audience and an inspiring BoF showcased the high interest in the various topics and the increasing interest in OSGi-based solutions.

Excitement about OSGi is expected at the OSGi Community Event, but it also builds at other events and shows the breadth of the OSGi ecosystem as it presents the value of OSGi. For instance, there were 14 sessions with OSGi technology at Java One 2012. Importantly, they weren’t all “OSGi sessions,” but OSGi is a part of so many efforts that it works its way into diverse talks.

There is an increasing understanding and recognition that OSGi is the right technology when it comes to reducing complexity with modularity, whether it’s for large-scale distributed systems or small, embedded applications.

In the Smart Home market, which touches both large-scale utilities as well as embedded applications, OSGi adoption is gaining speed. OSGi is deployed in a variety of Smart Home devices and portal-based solutions because it provides a dynamic programming model for all applications and the capability to integrate and enhance multiple devices in a networked environment at runtime. There is an entire ecosystem building around Smart Home and Smart Energy solutions – and OSGi is integral to more and more of these solutions. You can expect that several operators and their partners will commercially launch OSGi based solutions in 2013.

Key standardization organizations are joining forces at their industry members’ request to further speed up the process for such end-to-end solutions. An OSGi workshop in October launched coordinated efforts regarding the device abstraction layer and follow-up meetings and action plans have followed.  It’s moving fast because the market wants a standardized device abstraction layer solution as soon as possible – and OSGi is considered to be a key piece of the puzzle. 

OSGi is also an industry standard for enterprise application server providers, and is embraced by open source projects within the Apache and Eclipse communities. Enterprise adopters don’t necessarily promote their use of OSGi yet, but it could become a notable competitive differentiator, as it has in the Smart Home market.

This momentum across industries promotes and builds the case for both OSGi adoption and Alliance membership. Open source as well as commercial projects propel the development of tooling and fuel steady development of the OSGi ecosystem itself, including a broad variety of industry players from enterprise software companies, operators and utility providers to software providers, manufacturers of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), white goods, SoC vendors, Independent Software Vendors (including portal and application vendors), automotive manufacturers, and telematics providers. The cross-industry OSGi ecosystem allows companies to discover new partners and to share the workload while enhancing their product portfolio and service offerings –even in the aftermarket. That’s why it’s beneficial to become part of it – a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Inspiring times -- when you take a step back to notice. Of course, there is always more work to do and more ideas of where we can go, but we know the cycle between specification work and adoption is shrinking while the ecosystem grows. And that is to all of our benefit.

Susan Schwarze
OSGi VP Marketing

OSGi DevCon 2013 CFP Closes 19 Nov, 2012

Thanks to everyone who made a submission for the Early Bird Talk selection for OSGi DevCon 2013.  As you have probably seen from @OSGiAlliance on Twitter, the talk selected was Modularity in the Cloud: a Case Study by P Bakker and Marcel Offermans from Luminis.

Well we are quickly on to the next Call For Papers deadline... and this time its your last chance if you want to be considered for a speaking slot at OSGi DevCon next year.

The CFP closes on Monday, November 19, so don't delay and be sure to make your submissions by then.  

We are especially looking for talks about OSGi systems that have been deployed in the embedded, enterprise or desktop worlds; along with talks about tools and frameworks that improve the OSGi experience for developers.  In addition any use cases or projects that are taking advantage of OSGi and Cloud are also of interest.  Finally we would like to hear from anyone who would like to give an OSGi tutorial, bearing in mind that this should ideally include some hands-on activities for the audience.

For more information about the CFP please visit the OSGi DevCon 2013 page.

We have an eager Selection Committee on hand to review all the submissions and select the program, and we are hoping to announce the final program before the end of this year.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us by email.

Mike Francis & BJ Hargrave

OSGi DevCon 2013 Program Committee

4.3 Companion Code for Java 7

Starting in version 4.3, OSGi started to use generics in some of the API including the Core specification. Generics were introduced to the Java language in Java 5. However, OSGi needed to continue to support embedded use cases which use the CDC/Foundation 1.1 runtime which is still based upon the Java 1.4 language level and JVM. To address this issue, OSGi compiled the APIs with -target jsr14; an undocumented javac flag introduced before Java 5 was final. So we had the best of both worlds: we can use generics and still compile to run on Java 1.4 based runtimes.

This worked for Java 5 and Java 6. But when Java 7 shipped, two things changed: javac no longer understood the jsr14 option to -target and javac refused to recognize the attributes containing the generics information in class files already compiled with -target jsr14. The change to no longer support creating -target jsr14 class files was ok; we could continue to compile with Java 6 javac. But the change to the javac to cease to recognize the class file attributes with the generics information in existing class files was a bigger problem. It meant that the 4.3 API jars published by OSGi were not useable by people who need to compile with Java 7 javac. By not useable, I mean javac treated the classes as if they did not contain any generics information: they were raw. A bug was filed against Java to see if this was some mistake or oversight. The reply was that the change was intentional.

At the time this was first noticed, Java 7 was new and not too widely used. OSGi also included the source code in the jars so you could recompile the code yourself if you needed. Later, when it came time to ship Core R5, we changed to compile the API classes with -target 1.5 and so they work fine on Java 7. So problem solved; the new release's jars don't use -target jsr14! Except some of the current OSGi implementations (I'm looking at you Felix and Karaf) are still based upon Core 4.3 and thus people using those implementations still need to use the Core 4.3 API. And if they also want to use Java 7, they need to recompile the OSGi API source. So after some prodding by a few folks, OSGi rebuilt the Core and Compendium API jars as Core 4.3.1 and Compendium 4.3.1. The new jars have the same packages at the same package versions having the same API signatures. They are just not compiled with -target jsr14 so they work fine with Java 7.

So if you need to use the 4.3 API with Java 7, pick up these new 4.3.1 jars. They should also be available on maven shortly.

OSGi DevCon 2013 - Call For Papers

So with the OSGi Community Event finishing yesterday the focus now shifts to OSGi DevCon 2013.

We are pleased to be co-locating OSGi DevCon 2013 with EclipseCon in Boston, MA from March 25 to 28, 2013.

The Call For Papers is open and runs until November 19 this year.

However an Early Bird Selection of one talk for the program will be made from the submissions received by October 31.

Yes thats right, the Early Bird Selection deadline is next Wednesday. So you have only 6 days left if you want to maximize your chances of selection and get a free pass to the OSGi DevCon and EclipseCon conference.

We want to hear about experiences from speakers who have deployed OSGi based systems, large and small, as well as embedded, enterprise, or desktop systems. We are also especially keen on tools and frameworks that make it easy to build, use, and deploy OSGi-based applications along with the growing number of uses of OSGi with cloud.

To find out more about how to make a talk submission please visit the OSGi DevCon 2013 conference page.

If you have any questions please contact the OSGi DevCon 2013 Program Committee by email.

We look forward to reviewing your submissions.

Mike Francis & BJ Hargrave

OSGi DevCon 2013 Program Committee

You Need to Attend the OSGi Community Event 2012

Do you want to get more engaged, meet with interesting people, share ideas, difficulties, and successes? When’s the last time you were able to combine work and pleasure very easily? Well, there is a good opportunity on the horizon.

It’s the time of the year when the OSGi Community gets together to learn about and share new technology updates and latest business deployments, discuss technical insights and further developments. Do you want to talk about

•  Tasks to tackle?
• Why it is important to reduce complexity with OSGi?
• Why modularity is important?
• What Cloud ecosystems have to do with OSGi?
• How we develop or migrate more easily enterprise applications or smart home applications?
• Whether OSGi is just for gurus?
• What you want to know about versioning, subsystems, or class-loading in OSGi based systems?
• How do you make your code OSGi friendly?
• And why business solutions from Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, and Telecom Italia are heavily based on OSGi technology?

 These and more questions will be answered at the OSGi Community Event 2012 - the program reflects the broad use of OSGi technology in diverse markets and product solutions and also includes

• Suggestions for future specification work,
• OSGi in C and C++,
• And developer benefits to use OSGi/bnd tools in their workflow.

 In order to further leverage the benefits for all attendees and foster the exchange of information and activities in the constantly growing ecosystem, the OSGi Community Event 2012 is co-located with EclipseCon Europe. Mingle and benefit from the cool program … and during the evenings chill and digest the huge information flow while listening to a live band and having loads of fun, including a competition involving an Aibotix drone which also will be presented in Jörg Lamprecht’s key note.

So there’s a terrific program, a lot of opportunities to learn, share, and mingle and, certainly, also to party together.  To top all past conferences, we wait for you and your colleagues to participate and get involved. Discounts? First of all, enter the coupon code 'OSGi'; then, benefit from the early bird (until September 30th), student, press, academics or group discounts.

Now it’s your turn to register – welcome (back) to exciting times!

Susan Schwarze
OSGi Alliance VP Marketing