Back to the future!

As the new OSGi Evangelist I got the privilege to get a lot of input from many people. What I heard was not always positive. When you work hard on a specification for a long time a certain tunnel vision sets in, that is the only excuse I have.

The good news was that people that use OSGi, the ones that pass the first threshold, are invariably enthusiastic about the technology. I am primary a techie, so my ego was at least saved. Not that it matters much because in the end the technical work only has value when the OSGi members thrive with this technology. And that is where the problem is, the success of OSGi in Eclipse and Apache over shadows the fact that the adoption of OSGi in the embedded world is not going that well. And it is the embedded world where the OSGi members have their primary interest.

One member specialized in embedded systems told me that they looked at R4 and could not see anything they really felt an urgent need to implement. Another member told me that it is still very hard to make a case for OSGi because the license fees for the VM, the OSGi infrastructure, the extra memory, and especially the management system are adding too much to the bill of materials to justify the added functionality. Another problem that was mentioned the dichotomy between the native code and the OSGi part. The OSGi Service Platform provides elegant remote management but it does not show how to handle the native code management.

Still, putting OSGi on embedded devices is doable. The Possio Gateway is one of my favorite, though the price is a bit steep. I know there is some interesting research at Fraunhoferto add OSGi to devices with 50Mhz/4 Mb Flash/16Mb RAM. Which is about as small as it gets today.

Interestingly, there are lots of tiny boards available that use Java. JStamp, JStik, TINI, and many more. Surprisingly, none of them has made the link to OSGi. At the same time, there is lots of interesting stuff going on in the Embedded Linux market. I looked at the NSLU2 project. This a $80 Linksys device with very exciting specs: 266 Mhz/ 8Mb Flash/ 64Mb RAM/ 2xUSB / Ethernet. Unfortunately, also here Java plays a very minor role and OSGi is absent.

Unfortunate, because I am convinced that if we could standardize the software for embedded devices we could create a market. Now, each embedded project seems to have to figure out how to compile and test all the applications for every enviroment. Having a standardized environment could enable a huge software market.

So, as OSGi's Evangelist I see it as my job to get OSGi into more embedded devices. As a starter, I want to create a reference platform that contains a cheap hardware device with OSGi, a management system, and a set of applications. If you have ideas, or want to help out. Let me know!

    Peter Kriens