News

OSGi Alliance Service Platform Release 4 Core Specification Now Publicly Available (26/10/2005)

Powerful Modularization Capabilities Provided as the Basis for New Software Services

During their Fourth Annual Developer Forum & World Congress, the OSGi(TM) Alliance announced public availability of the Service Platform Release 4 Core Specification. Now available for download at http://www.osgi.org, the new specifications add powerful modularization capabilities to Java(TM). In addition they serve as a base for new services in mobile phones, cars, portable devices, and other environments.

The release has resulted from the collaborative efforts of many experts and authorities available to the OSGi Alliance through membership and partnerships. During the Developer Forum & World Congress, held October 11-14 in Paris, these experts detailed how to develop products using Release 4, and shared how OSGi technology and the R4 specifications add business value to the mobile, telematics, digital home and other industry ecosystems. Presentations, panel discussions, demonstrations and keynote speeches addressed the new R4 core specification, the business implications of using open standards and the many business cases for using OSGi technology.

"With the availability of R4, the various vertical market segments can adopt the OSGi specification with confidence that they are using a fully mature and established specification," said OSGi Alliance President, Stan Moyer, Executive Director, Telcordia. "R4 serves as the foundation for an enhanced service-oriented architecture that delivers managed services to devices in multiple environments," he said. "Its component-oriented model provides considerable cost saving options during the development and maintenance of networked devices, thus enabling the rapid development of many service-oriented capabilities in the industry."

Moyer explained that using the OSGi Service Platform in a networked device adds the capability to securely manage the life cycle of the software services in the device from anywhere in the network. Software services can be installed, updated, or removed in a controlled manner without having to disrupt the operation of the device.

"Many of the new features offered by R4 enable the packaging and integration of new and legacy software into components which can be deployed into environments spanning the spectrum from resource constrained devices to high end servers," said BJ Hargrave, OSGi Alliance Chief Technology Officer, and Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM. These features include:

-- Powerful new modularization capabilities to Java providing enhanced encapsulation of networked services that can share a single VM.

-- Modularized class sharing and hiding of implementation details;

-- Advanced handling of multiple versions of the same classes so old and new applications can execute within the same VM;

-- Localization of OSGi bundle manifests enabling service deployment anywhere;

-- Enhancements in security and policies. The new Conditional Permission Admin service provides an elegant and simple way to manage networked services securely. It also supports dynamic policies that can depend on external (custom) conditions. Combined with R4 support for digital signatures, this provides a central security solution to large deployments of products using the OSGi Service Platform.

-- A Declarative Services specification that addresses memory footprint issues that can prevent small embedded devices from using a service oriented architecture to support multiple applications. Additionally, it significantly simplifies the service-oriented programming model by declaratively handling the dynamics of services.

-- Compatibility with Release 3, requiring no changes for existing OSGi bundles, applications, or services.

The Service Platform's component model enables networked services to dynamically discover other services and work together to achieve the desired functionality. Other groups and consortia, such as the Eclipse Foundation, the Java Community Process (JCP), and the ERTICO GST project, have worked with the OSGi Alliance to define service specifications that address common industry needs in an open and non-proprietary way.

www.osgi.org