OSGi Developer Conference

Ok, some raw spamming: If you have any interest in OSGi, try to participate in the OSGi Developer conference in Paris, October 11 and 12. Obviously a chance to be in Paris is always good, but in this case it is possible to meet all those people that worked on the specifications in persons. And I would really like to meet the people that are using OSGi or evaluating it.

This is the first OSGi Developer Congress and the program is very strong. Obviously, you do not want to miss my presentation about R4 (which has soooo many cool new features) as well as a presentation about Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and OSGi. I strongly believe that AOP will combine an easy programming model with all the advantages of the dynamic service model.

We are also planning to have a session where CPEG members are tried for crimes against software engineering. You can finally get all frustrations about the OSGi specification out of your system during this session. Shoot at everything you think is disgusted in the spec. I'd love to join the prosecution but I am afraid I will be on the defense.

We will be getting insight into how Eclipse and OSGi are bonded. Jeff McAffer, the key driver behind OSGi in Eclipse, will present a tutorial on using Eclipse as an OSGi runtime in the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. And when you are at it, ask him why Eclipse has no menu item to install a bundle yet.

One of the key issues with OSGi technology is robustness of the Java VMs. For example it is very hard, if not impossible, to reliably remove a bundle completely from a VM if it does not want to. There is a session with several papers that are addressing the robustness aspects without requiring full isolation which can be rather expensive.

A lot of attention will be spent on talking about the programming model. Richard S. Hall and Umberto Cervantes work on simplifying the use of the dynamic services has triggered other people to also start thinking along these lines. For example, Marcel Offermans will present another view.

There are too many talks to all discuss here. Take a look at the program and come! If you want to meet during the conference, mail me so we can set up a time.

  Peter Kriens

posted by Peter @ Friday, August 26, 2005