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Championing the Universal Component Model
Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation Mike Milinkovich uses the EclipseCon Press Conference to emphasize the "synergy" between his organization and the OSGi Alliance, in addition to making announcements about Eclipse's growing community and latest projects.
by Lauren Y. Dresnick
March 30, 2007
The Eclipse Foundation continues to gain industry momentum, announcing 76 projects, 163 members, 768 committers, and over 1,300 registrants at EclipseCon 2007 in Santa Clara, CA in early March. But Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, was focused on more than the organization's rapid expansion and growing popularity during the event's press conference.
Milinkovich emphasized the vital relationship between the Eclipse Foundation and the OSGi Alliance. He explained, "There is great synergy between OSGi, as a standards organization, and Eclipse, as an open source community. [The Eclipse Foundation] really believes that the synergy between open source and open standards is going to drive the next wave of innovation in the software industry."
The OSGi Alliance was founded in 1999 to specify a component standard for Java developers building large-scale, distributed software in smaller components. OSGi provides a service-oriented, component-based development environment and standards for managing software life cycles. With roots in embedded devices, primarily for the automotive and telecom industries, OSGi is making headway in enterprise IT. The OSGi Alliance has recently proposed its component model as a standard to the Java Community Process (JCP) through JSR 292.
Since adopting the technology in 2004 for the 3.0 release of its standardized plug-in model, the Eclipse Foundation has helped bring OSGi to the industry forefront. Milinkovich said that adopting OSGi technology was "a great success for [the Eclipse Foundation]. Eclipse has helped OSGi, in turn, because Eclipse is the biggest community of interest around building OSGi bundles."
Eclipse offers the tools for OSGi, as well as the implementations of the run-time engine. Milinkovich said, "Right now the Eclipse PDE (the Eclipse plug-in development environment)—in terms of a GUI, for people using that style of development—is the most effective tool out there for building OSGi bundles and managing entities between them."
The Eclipse Foundation attributes OSGi's success to a variety of factors. OSGi is light-weight, or less than 1 MB. It's modular, meaning each component defines dependencies and versions. It's dynamic, with a life cycle for managing and provisioning components. And it's a multiplatform and cross-industry standard, where specifications span embedded devices, rich client applications, and server applications.
Milinkovich also expressed that there is interest within the Eclipse community to become involved with OSGi's newly formed Enterprise Expert Group. He noted evolving standards that are expected from this group and emphasized the importance of Eclipse implementations based on these standards.
Eclipse's Newest Strategic Developer
Oracle is one of the companies participating in the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group, as was noted by Milinkovich, before he turned the podium over to Dennis Leung, vice president of software development in the Fusion Middleware Group at Oracle.
Leung announced that Oracle recently joined the Eclipse board of directors, on which he will serve as Oracle's representative. As factors influencing Oracle's decision to increase its involvement with the Eclipse Foundation, he sited the "balanced" Eclipse Governance Model, his company's overall success with involvement in Eclipse projects so far, and positive feedback from customers and the "vibrant" Eclipse community.
Leung also highlighted three projects that Oracle's been leading for the past few years, including Dali JPA tooling, JavaServer Faces (JSF) tooling, and BPEL tooling, and Oracle's integration on the database side, with continued participation in a DTP Enablement subproject and providing OC4J/OAS Deployment adapter for WTP to integrate.
However, Leung's biggest announcement at the press briefing was Oracle's newest project, the OSGi-based Eclipse Persistence Platform. Oracle hopes to provide an OSGi-based set of persistent services, which will be based on an initial code contribution from its TopLink product. TopLink's object-relational mapping aspects, along with other functionalities will "round out the set of services that people need to build modern day SOA applications," said Leung. "With the same persistence platform, you can access multiple data sources and materialize them as different data structures, using different standards."
Taking on AJAX and Dynamic Languages
Marking yet another new direction for the Eclipse community, Milinkovich also touched on Eclipse's growing involvement with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and other dynamic languages. Milinkovich explained, "The Eclipse community is trying to take the best of ideas of the rich client platform and extend that out to developers who want to build AJAX applications."
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