EclipseRT Day Toronto/Session Abstracts

Introduction to Equinox and OSGi

The OSGi specification provides a powerful modularity runtime for the Java platform which promotes strong modularity, versioning and dynamic management of applications. The Equinox project was founded to enable the Eclipse community to exploit the benefits of OSGi technology. At its core the Equinox team implements the OSGi Framework specification as well as several other OSGi Service Specifications such as the Event Admin, Preferences, Http, User Admin, Application Admin and others. All other components in Equinox are built upon the core OSGi technology.

In this talk we will explain the the various components in the Equinox project. This includes the additional features available to OSGi developers such as the Eclipse Extension Registry, Server-Side, Provisioning, Security and others. We will demonstrate how Equinox components can be used to build OSGi applications.

Building Modular Softtware for Embedded Devices

It is well known within the Eclipse and OSGi development communities that OSGi is a powerful framework applicable to a wide variety of domains. Over the last 9 years it has gained significant traction for desktop applications, IDEs, and more recently, server-side applications. Based on our experience using OSGi and the open source Equinox framework on over a dozen embedded systems projects, we are happy to report that these technologies are just as powerful for embedded software development.

During this talk we will discuss several of our past and current projects in the defense, heavy equipment, industrial automation, and automotive domains. We will present some of the best practices for building flexible, cross-platform, high-performance embedded applications, and lessons learned along the way. We will demonstrate how the Eclipse DeviceKit framework can be used to access communication buses such as CAN, J1939, and MIL-STD-1553. And finally, we will explain how using OSGi and Equinox can simplify the development, testing, and deployment of your next application, whether embedded or not.

Case Study: Building composite applications with the Lotus Expeditor Platform for the TD Canada Trust Call Center

Abstract: Call Center agents are responsible to handle huge varieties of customer requests every day, they need to access multiple applications from heterogeneous backend systems. The technology team in TD Canada Trust has chosen the Lotus Expeditor Platform to bring web based applications, Host 3270 applications, rich client applications and web services together to provide an integrated desktop for their needs. In this session, you will also see how the development team design and structure the application to shorten the development cycle by re-using components to address needs from different lines of business.

Server-side Equinox

The server-side libraries in the Equinox project are now heading into their fourth year as part of the Eclipse platform. What we offer is a mature set of libraries for building OSGi web applications that in addition to being packaged with the IDE can be found in a wide range of commercial products at IBM and other vendors. OSGi is increasingly common place in server-side environments and in the last year there's been a noticeable shift both in the Java EE and OSGi communities where a greater focus is being placed on ensuring that the appropriate services are in place to build larger and more modular server applications.

In this talk we'll look at the Equinox server-side components and how we use them in the Eclipse platform today. In particular we'll look at the sorts of adjustments developers must make to work effectively with the server-side APIs and also at the various deployment options there are. Both the Equinox and OSGi server communities are actively working at improving perceived gaps in the OSGi service APIs as well as ways to make server applications more dynamic and reconfigurable. We'll cover what some of these efforts are and when we hope to see them fully integrated with Equinox.

e4 Overview and Demo

The e4 project is an incubator for building a next generation platform for pervasive, component-based applications and tools. A tech preview of e4 (0.9) shipped in July, and Eclipse 4.0 based on technologies from e4 is planned for Summer 2010. This talk will give an overview of the different work areas of e4 and their current state, together with a number of demos that show what's possible with e4. Topics include: JavaScript bundles, dependency injection and platform as services, model-based application UI, CSS styling, and web-based components.

Modular Java Applications with Spring, dm Server, and OSGi

Abstract: OSGi offers a powerful standards based approach to modularizing Java applications. However, working directly against a "bare" OSGi container can present its share of challenges for the average Java developer. In this session, we explore how the SpringSource dm Server can provide an enhanced environment in which to build and deploy OSGi based applications. Topics covered include the "Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi Service Platforms" project, which is the basis of the OSGi Blueprints specification, as well as a number of features available in the dm Server environment, including Slices, a set of functionality aimed at modularizing web applications, plan files, which introduce comprehensive scoping capabilities, shared bundle repositories, and a number of other features.