After too much time, I can finally announce that the OSGi Enterprise Specification is available in book form. You can now order it!

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Components and Annotations

My favorite OSGi spec is the Declarative Services specification. It is exactly as a specification should be: small and concise. It does not try to be everything for everybody. The only thing it does is handle your service dependencies. And it does that very well, without compromises. And as a bonus, it is also well integrated with Configuration Admin.

The only potential flaw is that it uses XML for its configuration data. XML is fine for computers but it lacks about every possible feature necessary to make it user friendly. However, long time ago I added an extra syntax to bnd to create the XML on the fly directly from the manifest header. For example: Read more ...

Bnd Goes to Java 5!

Java 5 is like a good wine. Once you've learned to appreciate it, other wines, that you used to enjoy, taste bland. They did not change, they are still the same but suddenly you get lack the sparkle and that aftertaste. Though iterators were an improvement over enumerators, they now suddenly look clumsy.

I actually ported bnd to Java 5 last year (and warned any users) but I was dumb enough to also make a lot of other changes (when will I learn). I kept the 1.4 version current but ended up making more and more changes only in the 1.4 version. However, I am now going to move all of the bnd code to Java 5 and maintain one version. Read more ...