Berichten met label provisioning
EZdroid launched
Geplaatst door Arjan Schaaf in Uncategorized op 29 mei 2009
The EZdroid initiative is launched: www.ezdroid.com
We are pleased to announce the launch of EZdroid, the world’s first open-source, collaborative platform for the safe deployment of component-based software applications and content across Android, and other Linux-based mobile devices.
EZdroid was founded by two of Europe’s leading companies in the field of OSS technology; the platform consists of Android, Apache Felix and a number of their own enhancements (e.g. software license-, device- and integrated software-management). EZdroid supports the secure deployment of software applications and content (known as Provisioning) to Android phones and in the future, other Linux-based operating systems. It is available to any organization or individual wishing to make software and content available to Android users world-wide. Further information and a demonstration of the platform is now available and downloadable to Android phones at: http://www.ezdroid.com.
EZdroid’s founders: Luminis BV (www.luminis.nl/en) of The Netherlands and Akquinet GmbH (www.akquinet.com/en) of Germany are now inviting partners and collaborators to become part of the EZdroid community – whether these are developers, wishing to show-case their applications, business partners interested in co-development or an OEM relationship, or organizations which are interested in owning and controlling their own application repository/App Store.
The launch of EZdroid is very significant; it is the world’s first platform, built from open source components, which will allow the mass deployment of applications without proprietary licensing issues. The founders intend to supplement the platform with a validation and quality assurance system – to ensure that applications are safe and do not interfere with Android’s normal operations.
The OSGi Community Event in Berlin 2008
Geplaatst door Marcel Offermans in Uncategorized op 6 november 2008
Day 1, a beautiful sunny day, was reserved for business presentations. A lot of these presentations actually mentioned the same benefits, which makes a nice, consistent case for OSGi. Some of the bigger projects were funded research projects, and I was proud to see Martijn and Hans do a presentation and succesful demo of GX’s WebManager 9, an application that is commercially available and nicely shows the benefits of using OSGi in an enterprise content management environment.
Near the end of the day, we showed a demo of the L-iQ Provisioning Server. The interest was pretty overwhelming and we got to show it in action many times, doing demos for three hours straight. Our main demo showed Apache Felix and a simple paint program which visualizes the dynamics nicely.
We ended the evening with a couple of beers on the roof of our hotel with some people from ICW who were staying at the same hotel.
Day 2, still sunny but cooler, started with a keynote by Peter Kriens who took a long trip down memory lane, going back to the days at Ericsson where he first started on what later became OSGi. He ended with a small peek into the future and ended by stating the mission of the OSGi alliance now, which is to become THE component framework.
Later in the day we had presentations on several topics. There were two parallel tracks so I could not even attend everything. A talk on JOnAS 5 gave an overview on the architecture of the first open source, OSGi based application server and how they can dynamically load and unload services. They already use iPOJO, OBR and have a componentized EJB 3 implementation called EasyBeans. Michael Keith from Oracle explained how JPA was adapted to work on OSGi and wondered why there was not yet a standardized persistence solution for OSGi. Jan and Markus gave an interesting talk on the Eclipse Communication Framework and R-OSGi, explaining how they can do all types of distributed services. The Enterprise Expert Group will also address this soon, and we briefly talked to Eric Newcomer about that. Richard did a nice overview of iPOJO, going through over 100 slides in 45 minutes while still making a lot of sense. iPOJO is definitely the dependency and component management solution for the future, as soon as it gets an API so we can use it instead of our dependency manager.
ApacheCon EU 2008
Geplaatst door Marcel Offermans in Uncategorized op 11 april 2008
After a successful conference last year, Amsterdam was again hosting the european ApacheCon. Karl and I hooked up with Richard Hall and we travelled together to this year’s edition. The sessions started on wednesday and lasted until friday. As always, it was interesting to hook up with committers and users of various projects and exchange ideas.
From the various sessions we visited, there were some that were particularly interesting and worth mentioning here.
For everybody who has ever built protocols, Apache Mina is a great framework. It abstracts away most of the complication of the NIO API and contains many building blocks for creating scalable servers and clients that use a custom protocol.
If you need to do enterprise integration, and you’re familiar with the Enterprise Integration Patterns book, then Apache Camel will help you write these integrations. Camel itself is packaged as a set of Spring components that can be integrated into any application easily. Configurations are either done using XML or with a fluent Java API. The latter looks really great and allows you to express complicated rules in a very easy way. Another interesting thing you can do with Camel is implement Business Activity Monitors (BAM). These are rules that trigger exceptions if some condition is not met. For example, you can specify that whenever a message A comes in, you would expect a response message B within 3 seconds. You can furthermore say what should be done if that is not the case, for example post an alert message C.
One of the Apache projects that has really adopted OSGi and Apache Felix is the ServiceMix project. They managed to implement JBI on top of OSGi and are working with the spec leads to make JBI fit more naturally with OSGi (which currently is not really the case). This is really one of the projects that will help move OSGi into the enterprise.
The Apache Sling project had an interesting BOF. They are close to doing their first release and are trying to grow their community. One of the nice aspects of Sling is that it packages Apache JackRabbit in OSGi bundles. Of course this should really happen within JackRabbit but it’s a great initiative. Sling itself is a web application development platform that uses REST principles to build content repositories.
Apart from the sessions, we also had several talks with people about Apache Felix. During the BOF about Apache Sling we discovered they had a very nice web based management console for OSGi. Since this was not in any way Sling specific, we agreed to donate it to Felix, as it would be a nice addition to our text and Swing based shells. You can follow that process on either the Sling or the Felix mailing list.
Furthermore, we discussed the possibility of a simple, pluggable installer that combines efforts from Peter Kriens, ServiceMix and Sling to create an easy to use, convenient installer that will speed up development.
A third interesting topic was the issue of testing OSGi bundles on multiple frameworks and rebranding. Even though we at Felix ensure we only use standard OSGi features that are part of the spec, some people think that bundles that are part of the Felix project only work on Felix. That’s of course not true, but we don’t explicitly test and guarantee the working of these bundles on other frameworks either. So, like with many hardware components that often get rebranded, we discussed the value of doing this for OSGi bundles. That way, companies like JayWay and luminis could provide branded bundles to their customers and make sure they comply with their quality and testing standards.
As a general trend, a lot of projects are now moving towards Java 5 as their minimum version, mostly stating generics and the concurrency API’s as their prime reasons. This poses an interesting question for OSGi development, since not all embedded JVM’s are Java 5 compliant yet. Should some kind of new Foundation profile be defined that includes the most important features of Java 5?
Finally, we showed some people our software component provisioning server and got positive reactions and some good feedback. In general we had a great time and learned some new things. Next year, we will try to organize more events around OSGi and Apache Felix in a further attempt to grow our community.