[oscar-devel] OSGi 2.0 Spec Released

[Richard S. H. <he...@un...>]

[Sorry if you receive this multiple times because I am posting to the 
devel and user mailing list.]

OSGi released version 2.0 of the OSGi specification this last week, so I 
thought I would make a few comments and let everyone know what's up.

As most people know, the OSGi specification is broken into two parts, 
the OSGi framework and the OSGi services.  With Oscar I have been 
focusing on the framework portion, but the goal is to eventually include 
service implementations as well.

The good news regarding the new 2.0 specification is that the changes to 
the framework do not appear to be severe.  Some of the more significant 
changes are:

    * A "system" bundle was introduced for framework services (Oscar
      already has the same thing, although I called it the "container"
      bundle).
    * The elimination of "eager bundle update", which means that
      updating a bundle should NOT make the updated classes/resources
      immediately available.
    * Bundles can now have optional contents (e.g., documentation or
      source code) in their jar file.
    * Event delivery is now asynchronous except in certain cases.
    * A few classes and methods were added.

In addition to these framework changes, some new services that are 
intimately tied to the framework implementation were added as well; 
these include:

    * Package Admin Service - enables management of package sharing
      (i.e., refreshing after an update).
    * Permission Admin Service - enables management of bundle permissions.
    * Service Tracker - enables management of service dependencies.
    * Configuration Admin Service - enables management of bundle versioning.

Clearly most of the effort in shifting Oscar towards OSGi 2.0 will go 
into creating these framework-oriented services.  In most cases, these 
services are already implemented in Oscar in some fashion and in other 
cases they actually make sense to have, so the effort seems justified.

Of course, that still leaves the other services to be implemented and I 
doubt that I can create them all in a reasonable amount of time, so if 
someone has a particular service they are interested in developing 
perhaps you could contact me.

I am hoping to make progress on Oscar this Fall after a two hectic 
months of traveling and the various travails that have befallen the 
world.  I plan on posting some issues to the developer mailing list 
shortly in order to get some feedback and get back to work.

Cheers,

-> richard