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 OSGi Everywhere
After finishing our last interview with Jeff McAffer covering the Eclipse RCP effort as well as topics like OSGi/Equinox, I got a very good sense of the magnitude of the Eclipse platform.
As I understand it, OSGi is a pluggable system specification, providing an outline for a system of bundles (or "plugins") that can be added or removed from a greater composite to create an application. Equinox is the Eclipse foundation's implementation of the OSGi specification in addition to adding some extensions of their own to create the platform for the Eclipse effort.
I used to think that the foundation was the same as the Eclipse Platform, the building blocks for an IDE or more recently, the building blocks for some sort of client side application. What Jeff pointed out to me is that the Equinox work is in fact even more low level than that. The Equinox work provides the pluggable system as specified by OSGi in addition to some other Eclipse-specific additions. What that leaves you with is a solid basis for any kind of pluggable software system whether that be a SWT application, Swing application, web application, embedded system or any other kind of software system. In fact, the application of the OSGi/Equinox framework applied to web application development was covered in depth at EclipseZone in a 2 part series Part 1 , Part 2. More recently we also covered how OSGi has been leveraged to componentize WebSphere 6.1 more effectively.
Jeff also discussed with me some of the applications of OSGi in the embedded industry, like the computers that control the new BMWs. Other EZ readers have also shown an interest in wanting to deploy OSGi more widely in their own companies for the purpose of supporting a single deployment platform. I wondered what kind of benefits could be squeezed out of the software development industry if a common platform for development like this could be established and accepted by all the big corporations out there. Clearly IBM buys into this, along with the Eclipse foundation and any company building on Equinox/Eclipse Platform, but what about Sun?
Sun comes up a lot in my newsletters because I see them as the last force stopping anything coming out of IBM or Eclipse from gaining mass adoption unquestioned across the board. I'm not suggesting Eclipse won't become huge without them, but imagine if Sun suddenly accepted OSGi (and even Equinox), and started shipping the JDK (and more) based around that concept? That affirmation of the technology would be huge and I would forsee the adoption just exploding from end to end. I also imagine quite a few efforts springing up in the .NET arena and other groups trying to accomplish the same work.
Regardless of what the big players in the market decide, I think for your next project you might consider walking through the Equinox site and giving the reading there a try to see if it is a technology you or your company may want to normalize your efforts on.
Until Next Time,
Riyad Kalla
editors@eclipsezone.com
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