OSGi UK User Group Kick-Off. Making Java Digestable

A couple of weeks ago we had the inaugural meeting of the OSGi UK user group. I am one of the founding members, but the driving force behind the creation of the forum is a UK startup, and client of mine, called Paremus.

What is OSGi? I explained in a post about what we dubbed the Stackless Stack.

OSGi allows modules of Java classes to be loaded on demand. There is no need to load the entire Java stack to run an application – just the runtime services it actually requires. OSGi therefore enables a more dynamic, less constricted Java, which partially explains its enthusiastic backing from major vendors such as IBM, BEA and Oracle.

Indeed if the Oracle Sun deal goes through OSGi will receive a major boost, but that’s a topic for a different post. OSGi and Spring are both technologies that make enterprise Java a lot easier to use – interesting times for the venerable language and runtime.

We held the meeting in the Merrill Lynch Financial Centre in Houndsditch, and there was a good smattering of end users, vendors and integrators. Mike Francis introduced the new group, Neil Bartlett then reviewed OSGI Devcon (held at EclipseCon) for the group, before David Savage, one of Paremus’ developers, gave a talk explaining some of the complexities and limitations of current OSGi tooling.

The slides can all be found over here.

Its very early days, but hopefully the group has legs. If you’re in the enterprise Java space you should definitely join.