OSGi and Equinox Creating Highly Modular Java Systems

Everything developers need to know to leverage Equinox and OSGi - the powerful technologies that underpin Eclipse bull; bull;A complete hands-on tutorial, great sample code, and deep technical dives wherever they're valuable to the working developer. bull;Covers the OSGi programming model, component development, OSGi services, Eclipse tools, server-side Eclipse, and much more. bull;Addresses a fast-growing market: Equinox and OSGi are gaining support from organizations ranging from IBM to BEA, Oracle to Spring. Equinox, the runtime that underpins all Eclipse applications, is gaining a lot of developer attention. Companies such as IBM, BEA, and Oracle are now shipping Equinox-based infrastructure products, as Equinox gains a deeper foothold on the server; new Equinox projects are launching; and developer communities such as Spring are moving to adopt Equinox technologies. This is the first hands-on, pragmatic, and complete guide to Equinox and the OSGi core framework it is built on. The authors - leading Equinox/OSGi experts - cover everything developers need to build successful Equinox/OSGi based applications. They systematically introduce the OSGi programming model, show how to build and compose OSGi components, and demonstrate how to take advantage of a wide range of standard services OSGi makes available to developers. They also offer deep technical insights into key areas of OSGi that have never been illuminated so clearly before. Along the way, the authors identify the key challenges and issues Equinox/OSGi developers will face.

Jeff McAffer co-leads the Eclipse RCP and Equinox OSGi projects, and is CTO and co-founder of EclipseSource. He is one of the architects of the Eclipse Platform and a coauthor of The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (Addison-Wesley) and OSGi and Equinox (Addison-Wesley). He co-leads the RT PMC and is a member of the Eclipse Project PMC, the Tools Project PMC and the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors and the Eclipse Architecture Council. Jeff is currently interested all aspects of Eclipse components, from developing and building bundles to deploying, installing and ultimately running them. Previous lives include being a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, a team lead at Object Technology International covering work in Smalltalk, distributed/parallel OO computing, expert systems, meta-level architectures and a Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo.

Paul VanderLei is a partner at Band XI International. He has more than 25 years of software engineering experience with an emphasis on object-oriented design and Agile practices. He is well-known for his innovative, yet straightforward, engineering solutions to complex problems. After earning his M.S. in Computer Science from Arizona State University, he joined Object Technology International and worked on a wide range of Smalltalk-based systems. After OTI’s acquisition by IBM, Paul gained more than 10 years of experience developing embedded Java applications and user interfaces for the automotive and medical industry as a founding member of the IBM Embedded Java Enablement Team. He has been using OSGi in commercial applications since 2000 and is a coauthor of OSGi and Equinox (Addison-Wesley), a book on the proper construction of Java applications using OSGi. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife and four children.

Simon Archer has more than 16 years of software engineering experience with an emphasis on object-oriented design, Agile practices, and software quality. After earning his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Portsmouth, UK, he worked as a Smalltalk developer at Knowledge System Corporation and later at Object Technology International, which was later acquired by IBM. While at OTI in 2000, Simon began working with and teaching OSGi in areas such as telematics and RFID. Today he works for IBM Rational using OSGi to build collaborative development tools for the Jazz Foundation project.