While at the Eclipse Runtime Summit, Michael Coté had the chance to talk with Iona's Eric Newcomer (CTO of Iona, Co-Chair, Enterprise Expert Group, OSGi Alliance, and well respected enterprise coding guy) about the emergence of OSGi as a server-side, or enterprise, technology.
They discuss how OSGi came to be a technology of interest in the enterprise space, and move on to the formation of the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. Eric goes through a high level list of what the "enterprise" here means: mostly the usual suspects of security, adding distributed functionality, messaging, scalability and performance.
Coté asks Eric about the process that the OSGi Alliance uses and they discuss the interesting role of the full time spec writer that the OSGi Alliance uses. As Eric outlines, there's a process pretty similar to the JCP process, where the deliverables are a specification, a reference implementation and TCKs to verify implementations.
They then discuss the overall idea of componentizing Java - what OSGi bundles and modules seek to do. As the Java world is pretty well split between Sun and OSGi's ambitions here, Eric gives some thoughts on it and a little bit of the historic background between the two parties.
Finally, we end up with a rough road-map for the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group and Eric's thoughts on the Eclipse Runtime Summit.
Total running time 21:25 minutes
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