OSGi Release 4 Specification Draft Available

I am glad to announce that it is now possible to download the R4 Specifications from the OSGi web site: DOWNLOAD.

This is the first time the OSGi is publishing a draft of the specification on the web site. I sincerely hope that it will be scrutinized, please provide any feedback you have to speccomments@osgi.org ? or directly to me.

This release consists of the core Framework and its services and a compendium with services. The Framework specification has been completely rewritten because we added so many new features and decomposed the Framework in 4 distinct layers:

Security Layer
Module Layer
Life Cycle Layer
Service Layer

The changes to the Framework are too numerous to list here. However, some of the highlights are: Implementation package sharing, more formal definition of the modularization, localizaton of manifest, better access to JAR files and resources, nummerous API changes that make the API easier to use, signing of JARs.

The Compendium consist of updated R3 services and a number of new services.The new services are the Event Manager and Declarative services. This section does not contain the upcoming Mobile release (information about Mobile services will become available when JSR 232 goes to public review in the coming weeks) nor does it contain the Vehicle services.

All in all, it is a major release. It feels good to know that R4 is already used in Eclipse and in the Apache Felix (was/is OSCAR) project. I guess Knopflerfish will also soon follow.

The OSGi World Congress is going to be interesting this year now so many people can have a preview of the R4 specifications.

In the coming weeks I intend to discuss the different parts of the specification in this forum. If you have any preferences for order, let me know.

   Peter Kriens

posted by Peter @ Thursday, September 08, 2005