Daniel Schneller's Blog

After the rather basic Power Workshop on Monday I attended the OSGi related sessions of the main conference yesterday. Though I was skeptical before - from my experience I often find conference speakers put too much focus on introductions and basic stuff at the beginning just to run short on time later - I was rather happy with the overall outcome. The first session "OSGi Today and Tomorrow" was held by Peter Kriens of OSGi alliance fame and provided some insight into the history and ideas of the platform which he co-invented. The "tomorrow" portion was rather short - about 5 minutes out of 75 - I would have liked some more information here. However as it was the first session of the main conference I did not expect to dive into much detail here. After that Matthias Lübken and Martin Lippert of akquinet it-agile GmbH talked about strategies and caveats when "porting" existing applications to use OSGi. I liked that talk even though I do not see why

Today I attended the Einführung in die OSGi Service Platform (Introduction to the OSGi service platform) power workshop at w-jax 2008 in Munich. I had hoped to get some more detailed insight into using that stuff in practice. While the workshop was clearly not a waste of time I was a little disappointed about the lack of practical relevance. The workshop was packed with about 50 people - with only 20 registrations. The first 90 minutes were spent installing Eclipse 3.4 and the Equinox SDK onto the participants' laptops. That time could have been put to better use had the session description not only told to bring a machine prepared with Java 5 but with the whole stack installed. So we had to hand around 5 CDs an some pen drives to get everyone up and ready. After that and some introductory words about OSGi we went through increasingly "complex" examples and tutorials. Though I understand the idea to explain the inner workings of bundle lifecycle, Activators, package im