Monday, December 21, 2009

IBM brings the power of OSGi to WebSphere

Back in 2006 we rebased WebSphere Application Server on OSGi in order to help us deliver a better application server. In 2009 we are bringing the power of OSGi to help you build better applications.

The IBM WebSphere Application Server V7 OSGi Applications Open Alpha program introduces to the application server the ability to build, deploy and run applications running on OSGi. Building on the work done in the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group (EEG) and in the Apache Aries incubator the alpha allows you to build modular applications that make use of familiar JEE technologies such as Servlets, JSPs and JPA.

There are many advantages to the support we are delivering in this alpha, some highlights include:
  • The ability to deploy a WAR file into the OSGi environment
  • Blueprint Container - A Spring-like Dependency Injection based container integrated with the OSGi service registry and standardized by the OSGi Alliance
  • The ability to share libraries between applications
  • Application composition by reference
  • The ability to provision an application based on the application dependencies and the content of an OSGi bundle repository
The alpha is available and includes some samples to get you going. We have also shipped the product documentation as a PDF and the Apache Aries site includes some information on the application model.

There has already been some coverage on the web about what we are doing in the alpha and I wanted to highlight two in particular. The first is a blog post by Kirk Knoernschild, who is giving a keynote at OSGi DevCon London in February. The other is an article on dzone where Ian Robinson is interviewed about the alpha.

Since I have mentioned it if you are in London in February some of my team are going to be at OSGi DevCon London running a tutorial on using Blueprint. In addition David Bosschaert one of the OSGi Alliance EEG co-chairs will be talking about the OSGi 4.2 Enterprise Release and we will be talking about the Apache Aries incubator.

Alasdair

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