Overcoming sticker shock: addressing the unexpected costs of moving to OSGi in the enterprise.
Eric Johnson
Making With Eclipse · Standard (25 mins)
Wednesday, 16:15, 25 minutes | Winchester
Tags: Build and Continuous Integration , OSGi DevCon , Tools
In moving our enterprise software to an OSGi environment, we encountered unexpected hurdles. While an OSGi runtime promises better decomposition of our code for more reuse, and a more dynamic execution environment, it also brings along costs. Unfortunately, some of those costs are non-functional costs, that have nothing to do with whether or not the underlying Java code was written correctly. This talk will identify and explore issues that lead to these costs, and what we've done about them.
The areas of concern include metadata for features and bundles, build system architecture, deployment, code that runs both within Eclipse and within pure OSGi environments, and a common development platform. Within each of these areas of concern, what have we encountered? What solutions can we share? Why do these problems exist in the first place? Are there tools out there to help, or do you need to roll your own solution for your particular needs? If you need to roll your own solution, what can you build upon?
I'll conclude the talk with a discussion of issues that we cannot resolve on our own. Specifically, what are the opportunities that we see that might be addressed by the OSGi and Eclipse communities? When the communities tackle these problems, what suggestions or ideas do we have? What are the communities already doing to address these problems?
Eric Johnson has been doing professional software development since the late 80's, and Java development since 2000. He has been working at TIBCO Software Inc. since 2001, and is now a principal architect. Eric's role at TIBCO includes looking broadly at strategic engineering questions. Eric's specific areas of focus include governance, Service Component Architecture (SCA), XML, OSGi, Eclipse, open source software, and build architecture.