Exciting April

It is an exciting time currently: OSGi gets a lot of buzz on the web currently, Pax Tools are getting release after release (Pax Runner 0.19.0 is out as well as Pax Exam 0.5 will follow soon), the proposal for a dedicated talk about pax tooling at the OSGi Devcon Europe in Zurich has been prepared.

OSGi Buzz in April
There is

• Craig Walls blogging about Pax Construct: From Zero to OSGi
  
• JavaPosse #245 interviewing BJ and Peter Kriens about OSGi
• James Strachan blogging about Pax Exam
• Charles Moulliard blogging about Pax Wicket,Web and Runner
  

Pax Runner 0.19.0
On April, 21, Alin Dreghicu released Pax Runner 0.19.0 which has the following highlights:

• Support or Knopflerfish 2.3.0


• Solve the problem introduced by Pax Runner - 0.18.0, that it did not work on windows anymore


• Ability to supply Pax Runner options as system properties (-D)

Pax Exam 0.5.0
This release will be out very soon (as soon as i am back home from hungary) and will include a variety of improvements and some new features like

• environment controlled debugging support (on/off by context)
• specifying optional configuration based on context (PAXEXAM-59)
• Inception of TinyBundles (see Exam Labs)
• Support of latest pax tools (runner+url)
  

OSGi DevCon Europe 2009
We are preparing a proposal for 50mins packed with hands-on experience of Pax Construct, Pax Runner and Pax Exam .
Hopefully it will be accepted, seeing you in Zurich then ?

Personal Changes
Also, i will switch my main corporate project in may, while its not clear how it will end up.
Even though, i am still looking for interesting projects that incorporate OSGi.
Does you company want to embrace OPS4J Pax Tools ? How about having developers right inside your project ?

Easter Egg

Low volume these days.
Because (at least in germany) eastern is about finding gifts/easter eggs.
I want to give you an easteregg as well.
For early adopters there is a new project in my ops4j laboratory called TinyBundles.
Its a small library that allows definition+creation of (tiny) bundles on the fly right inside your java app / pax exam testcase.
With this small library you can create small bundles like so:

newBundle()
         .set( Constants.BUNDLE_SYMBOLICNAME, "MyFirstTinyBundle" )
         .set( Constants.EXPORT_PACKAGE, "org.ops4j.pax.tinybundles.demo" )
         .set( Constants.IMPORT_PACKAGE, "org.ops4j.pax.tinybundles.demo,org.osgi.framework" )
         .set( Constants.BUNDLE_ACTIVATOR, MyFirstActivator.class.getName() )
         .addClass( MyFirstActivator.class )
         .addClass( HelloWorld.class )
         .addClass( HelloWorldImpl.class )
         .build( asStream() )

I found this quite useful when for example testing extender-bundles like PaxWeb or SpringDM.
As you see, resources are pulled from "current classpath" which means that you can easily contruct stuff like you do in ordinary java apps and pull them together using a fluent api like the above.
It is also trivial to create thounsands of (different) bundles to test high load for example.

Will try to put that into a regular pax project so that it get more "official".
That being said, the library is usable right now when used like specified in the demo sub project:
Demos.

Just checkout the whole project here, run mvn clean install (probably with "-Dmaven.test.skip=true to skip long running tests that may change all the time (remeber, its still in my local incubator ;) ,open it in your favourite ide and play with the demos if you like to.

Wishing everyone a nice easter weekend!

New and Newsworthy in Pax Exam 0.4

Pax Exam 0.4 has been released today!
There are not less than 19(!) features and enhancements in this release compared to the 0.3 version about one month ago. (Pax Exam Roadmap)

New Maven Plugin

There is now a maven plugin shipping with exam that allows you to define most configurations including dependencies right inside your pom.
Just configure the plugin like so:

org.ops4j.pax.exam
maven-paxexam-plugin

 
   generate-paxexam-config
   
     generate-paxexam-config
   
 


 provided
 
   ${target-framework}
 

Then you let the test know you want to pull the configuration from maven instead of defining them right inside the TestCase:

@RunWith( org.ops4j.pax.exam.junit.MavenConfiguredJUnit4TestRunner.class )
public class DependencyTest
{

@Inject
BundleContext context;

@Test
public void usePlugin()
{
assertNotNull( context );
}
}

Maven Archetype
You can get started with paxexam very quickly by using the new archetype.
Just run for example this mvn command to create a pre-configured maven based pax exam project.

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=org.ops4j.pax.exam -DarchetypeArtifactId=paxexam-junit-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=0.4.0-SNAPSHOT -DgroupId=com.company -DartifactId=company-osgitests

Mock Frameworks
Pax Exam now has bundled profiles of the following mock frameworks for you ready to use:

• EasyMock
• Mockito
• JMock

More Profiles
Thanks to Pax Runner 0.18, which comes with pax exam 0.4 we support much more profiles.
Here are some:

• CXF (webservices,soap)
  
• equinox configadmin
• equinox DS
• equinox even admin
• equinox http service
• equinox preference
• felix configadmin
• felix DS
• felix event admin
• felix webconsole
• modulefusion.hibernate
• modulefusion.ipojo
• modulefusion.wicket
• peaberry
• servicemix kernel gshell (karaf, anyone ?)
• spring dm
• Pax Web
• Pax URL
• .. and much more
  

The latest supported frameworks are:

• Apache Felix 1.6.0
• Equinox 3.5 M6
  
• Knopflerfish 2.2.1
• Concierge 1.0 RC2

To see all resolved tasks have a look at Pax Exam Roadmap.

Public Professional Profile

Just a quick note. There's now a public profile of my professional beings online here: http://osgify.com .

Have a look.

Vote for Java6 on OSX

Since late 2005 i am deveoping all open source stuff on my powerbook. (yes, that has to be replaced by a more recent maching like MBP C2D 2,4GHz very soon.. still gathering money).

Actually OSX is a very nice envinronment to work in. And it is quite well developing java in.
But Apple still haven't got released a Java6 SDK/JRE.
Even worse, there isn't much information about any (if any) timeschedule available.

Because of that this guys launched a vote on it.
I want a Java6 on my mac really soon, so no brainer i vote for it!

13949712720901ForOSX

Thats it.

Link: OSGi on Google's Android

This is just a quick referal to the fact that Felix has been successfully installed (and started) on Google's new operating system for mobile phones!

The guy behind is Karl Pauls of Luminis who is Apache Felix committer.
According to this blog entry only small change to the felix framework was necessary and chances are good that it will be integrated into standard apache felix.

Another comment at the blog was including felix into standard android.. so that's the way to go, google! ;-)
Good Job, Karl!

Toni

251.787.0

There are some projects running which now got an overal direction.
The projects are as of today:

• okidoki: a pretty unique integrated build system for osgi bundles.
  
• viscera: introducing your java as semantic web
  
• osgify.com: use osgi structures without hassle.
  

They are in active development since summer '07. Some of them are currently in private beta. Some but not all are osgi related.

Nevertheless they all make up a very unique development stack never touched before.
Once it's time, i will show information and release all projects for further development at ops4j.org.

The overall identifier for all efforts mentioned above is
Its not more than a pretty scary number.. but its a title which won't interfer with other projects.
Details on each of the projects as well as official announcements and public code release will show up here occasionally.

So long, happy coding,
Toni

Installing Jetty on Ubuntu - or

This one from http://dannyayers.com/2007/11/16/installing-jetty-on
is pretty funny in a subtle way:
Its an article entitled: Installing Jetty on Ubuntu Gutsy

added multiverse to /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre

apt-get install jetty

cd /usr/share/jetty/lib
java -jar start.jar /etc/jetty/jetty.xml

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/logging/LogFactory
...

apt-get remove jetty
apt-get autoremove

apt-get install tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps

* Starting Tomcat servlet engine tomcat5.5 [ OK ]

wget http://localhost:8180/
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Not sure if the original author thought about it this way but thats a pretty nice
analogy to common behaviour in IT - enterprise projects today.

Its pragmatic behaviour extended to a level where things are on the way getting worse!
Of cause i am not talking about technologies mentioned in this quote. Those can be exchanged anyway.