{"id":3395,"date":"2011-06-15T19:18:52","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T19:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=3395"},"modified":"2011-06-15T19:18:52","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T19:18:52","slug":"osgi-at-adobe-new-school-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/osgi-at-adobe-new-school-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"OSGi at Adobe: New School technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

[insert image here. i need to find a good one ;-)]<\/p>\n

i am at an Adobe event in San Jose for the analyst unveiling of the company’s Customer Experience Management platform and strategy.<\/p>\n

Rather than focusing on CEM for this post, which I talked to indepth already here<\/a>, I thought I would nerd out a little bit and talk about Adobe’s approach to what I call the Stackless Stack<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I asked David Neuscheler, CTO of Adobe CEM – who joined the firm as part of its Day Software acquisition, whether OSGi was something customers do, and should, care about. <\/p>\n

The question is a live one – there is currently quite a debate going on about the value of OSGi – led by voices such as Ross Mason of Mulesoft<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I see both Adobe and Dell using OSGi in new toolsets, so its certainly relevant to vendors. But what about users?<\/p>\n

Neuscheler said OSGi was more relevant to people running apps than building them.<\/p>\n

“OSGi gives us the power to modularise our solution. its a java spec that allows you to deal with java in a 24×7 environment – with no need to bring down the app for updates. that modularisation puts a burden on the developer – they need to think more about modularity.”<\/p>\n

[note- OSGi is a Java spec, but not in the JSR sense. OSGi is a separate standardisation stream – in the multipolar Java world<\/a>]. <\/p>\n

“Usually OSGi comes with maven, continuum etc for continuous integration. <\/p>\n

But there are 2 classes of developers- those that love tooling – the more complex, and automated, the better they like it- I call them class 2 developers.<\/p>\n

i am not one of them. i don’t like to spend three days installing a development environment. i like to just get going, we’re scripting types, more agile.<\/p>\n

However, once 100 people are using it<\/em>, it needs to be hardened for osgi containers etc.<\/p>\n

Makes sense. Build Agile, deploy Modular. Don’t optimise prematurely. <\/p>\n

Kevin Cochrane, VP of marketing, CEM at Adobe then jumped in. <\/p>\n

There are 3 OSGi use cases relevant to customers:<\/p>\n

1. updates. ie bug fixes to customer production systems. there is no need to bring them down.
\n2. extending new services. you might have 12 services, and a huge user community – you can still roll out extensions with no downtime.
\n3. discovery of new services. find a pre-packaged piece of code. browse, integrate and deploy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Arguably that’s two use cases- hot swappability and reuse. But those are very important use cases, and could be foundational.<\/p>\n

Adobe is going to move to appstore like offerings going forward; like every other software vendor it needs to deliver more and more services as a service, for its own apps and those of partners.<\/p>\n

The use cases Adobe describes chime pretty well in my thoughts on the Stackless Stack from February 2008.<\/p>\n

SOA is one of the most hyped terms of the recent few years in IT, but the story has largely focused on design time, rather than runtime flexibility. What would a SOA for middleware deployment look like? Like OSGi.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In conclusion: OSGi certainly shouldn’t be exposed to end users, or even all developers, but it can have significant value in large Java development shops serving big user populations. <\/p>\n

Any disclosure to make? I am one of the founders of the OSGi UK user group, the OSGi Alliance is a client, as is Adobe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[insert image here. i need to find a good one ;-)] i am at an Adobe event in San Jose for the analyst unveiling of the company’s Customer Experience Management platform and strategy. Rather than focusing on CEM for this post, which I talked to indepth already here, I thought I would nerd out a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[48,124,274],"class_list":["post-3395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-developers","tag-adobe","tag-day","tag-osgi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-SL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}