Thursday, August 30, 2012

Feedback requested for OSGi RFPs

Now that the summer holidays are drawing to a close for most, it would be a good time to look at some of the new work that is happening at OSGi.
In OSGi new specification efforts are kicked off by creating an RFP, a document that lists the uses-cases and requirements that the ultimate specification must implement. Once an RFP is agreed on the actual technical design and spec-work starts through the creation of a follow-up RFC.

Recently 4 new RFPs have been made public via OSGi bugzilla to see if people have further input or requirements, a process that has worked really well for the OSGi/CDI RFP and a little longer ago for the OSGi Cloud RFP.

RFP 143 OSGi Connect
The people at PojoSR have done some great work in showing how you can use OSGi Services in cases where you may not want to take on OSGi modularity (yet). RFP 143 captures requirements for creating a specification around this. The RFP can be found here: RFP 143.

RFP 150 HTTP Service Updates
The OSGi HTTP Service is widely used and it provides a very nice programming model for sevlets in an OSGi environment. However the specification is in need for an update to modernize it in relation to the Servlet spec itself. Additionally, the whiteboard pattern is introduced for servlet. You can find the RFP here: RFP 150.

RFP 151 Declarative Service Updates
A variety of updates are proposed to the Declarative Services specification. They can be found in RFP 151.

RFP 152 EJB Integration
EJB integration with OSGi has been done at Apache Aries, Glassfish and ObjectWeb (EasyBeans / JOnAS). Other appservers such as JBoss and others also provide some form of interaction between EJBs and OSGi. This RFP aims a writing a specification for this integration to make OSGi-enabled EJBs portable. You can find the RFP here: RFP 152.

So if you have any thoughts about these topics, do chime in and leave your comments or ideas on the associated bugs!