Welcome to my OSGi Blog @ TIBCO.
If you are looking for TIBCO specific information about OSGi, then I have to disappoint you. This blog is meant for communicating Enterprise Export Group related information to the greater OSGi community. The EEG is open only to OSGi Alliance members and it is up to the group members and especially the chair-men to open up the communication and information flow.
You may have heard that my co-chair since the inception of the EEG in late 2006, Eric Newcomer, has moved on to new responsibilities, which unfortunately do not allow him to stay involved in the OSGi work. I am very grateful to Eric for his help and mentorship.
However, we are very happy to have found an excellent successor in David Bosschaert from Progress Software.
Ok, back to business.
For the last three years the Enterprise Expert Group has worked on integrating mostly J* specs with OSGi in a manner that makes it easy for JEE developers to run existing JEE applications in OSGi while at the same time with only minimal adjustments to the design to allow for making optional use of the unique OSGi capabilities. One example of this adaptation is JNDI. For the JNDI spec, we have come up with an elegant way of using JNDI capabilities through services, while at the same time allowing for existing hard wired application to run in OSGi in "traditional" mode. You may also read this as "classic" or "legacy" depending on where you stand on the JEE vs. OSGi debate. In a similar fashion we have worked out the integration of JPA. Others map easily and elegantly without a lot of complications, e.g. JTA and JDBC.
In addition, in the enterprise profile we introduce new capabilities to OSGi, which are not driven by JAVA specs, i.e. Remote Services and Remote Service Admin Service. These powerful concepts allow for scaling of OSGi services across JVM boundaries and open up a whole new set of designs and use cases.
What is the Enterprise Profile now?
Glad you asked. Let me start by saying what it is not:
It is not an all-or-nothing specification document that requires compliant implementations to support every service listed. As such there is no single TCK that can be run against an implementation to claim compliance.
Instead, the profile is a collection of services from the core, compendium, as well as new enterprise driven services, which will ultimately be part of the compendium itself. The Enterprise Profile is the first point of reference for enterprise developers looking for guidance in the vast amount of spec documents. The first question someone new to OSGi typically is driven by is
'What is relevant to me? Do you expect me to read the entire 400 pg. core spec plus the 800 pg. compendium stack before I can do anything useful with it?'.
The introduction chapter to the spec is trying to put the services in context with typical use cases that developers can follow and identify themselves with. The following chapters are literal copies of the relevant chapters from the core and compendium specs for easy reference.
When you download the current draft you will notice that the list of included services seems incomplete. Indeed it is. The final version will also include already published and final specifications like Configuration Admin Service and Blueprint.
Where can you find the public Enterprise Profile?
The public interim draft can be found at the public OSGi web site for download by everyone.
In the near future we plan to release the final version and make it available for the general public. We encourage the OSGi community to take advantage of it, try it out, and provide valuable feedback about what works and what does not.
Stay tuned for more updates of the EEG at this location.
Tim.
