This talk, presented at FITE Club in London, explores the inter-relationship between complexity, modularity and cloud computing. "Complexity" has a number of different guises and these are first reviewed. The need for software modularity is discussed; not simply from the point of code re-use, but as the start point for self-assembling self-managing applications. Finally the attention turns to "Cloud Computing". The first generation of Cloud Computing simply consists of monolithic virtual machine images, one might argue no different from the server build solutions used by enterprises in the 90's. Against this background the characteristics for "true" Cloud Computing are presented.

POSH is an OSGi shell based on the new OSGi 4.2/RFC132 Command Line Interface. It works with current frameworks including Equinox, Felix and Knopflerfish, adding only two bundles, each < 50Kb. Prior to OSGi 4.2, there was no standard way to interact with an OSGi system using a line based interface. Commands had to be written for each framework and registered and invoked in a framework-specific manner. This talk, presented at OSGi DevCon Europe 2009,  begins with an overview of the new command-line interface, and then describes how we built POSH, a bash-like OSGi shell. A download of Posh is available as a demo to support this talk.

June 2009

Nimble is a fast, lightweight, dependency resolution and provisioning engine that emphasizes ease of use and extensibility. It forms the core of the latest releases of the commercial and open source versions of the Paremus Service Fabric. This talk from OSGi DevCon Europe 2009 looks at Nimble’s approach and demonstrate how it can be used to manage the full lifecycle of bundles and of non-OSGi artifacts. In particular it discusses how to use Nimble from the command line to resolve and start bundles, attaching fragments as determined by policy; remove unused bundles; and resolve dependencies that are implicit in bundles, but not expressed as package-imports. A download of Nimble in use with Posh is available as a demo to support this talk.

OSGi Release Versioning Strategies

March 2009

Industry standard release numbering schemes like {1.0-rc1,1.0-rc2, 1.0} or {1.0-SNAPSHOT, 1.0} don't work well for OSGi package versioning. This is because the lexical ordering on which they rely leads to situations where, for example, '1.0-rc1' is seen as a later version than '1.0-final', and is thus preferred if both are in the range specified by an importer.
This talk explores various OSGi-friendly release versioning strategies, including use of attributes to identify release types like SNAPSHOTs.

- 9 slides
(0.3MB PDF)

How to Build Large Scale Enterprise Applications using OSGi

March 2008

OSGi started out as a technology for building software for embedded devices, but it's applicability goes far wider than this as demonstrated by the activities in the OSGi Expert Enterprise Group over the past 18 months.

This 'long talk' presented at EclipseCon 2008, reviews some of the challenges and benefits of taking OSGi out of the device, off the desktop and into enterprise scale deployments. There is a review of the problem domain; discussion of applicable patterns; and references to a real world implementation. The talk is technical in nature with code samples, and readers should ideally have a basic understanding of OSGi.

- 51 slides
(0.6MB PDF)

Introduction to the Newton* project - Distributed OSGi and SCA

March 2008

The Newton Project is an open source framework, built upon OSGi and SCA standards, that provides a lightweight, distributed framework for next generation composite applications built out of OSGi bundles and described as SCA documents. In addition to distribution, Newton also provides a simple automated deployment model for application code and middleware, along with a sophisticated provisioning capability for ensuring application availability even under failure scenarios.

* Note: Newton is now called the Paremus Service Fabric Community Edition.

- 28 slides
(0.2MB PDF)

How to distribute Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi

March 2008

The Spring Framework has adopted OSGi for its component architecture. This 'short talk' presented at EclipseCon 2008, discusses how using the Newton* open source distributed OSGi framework it is possible to transparently distribute Spring-OSGi based applications. A review of the basics of the Newton* Project will be provided along with examples of how a Spring application developed on a single machine can be simply scaled out across a distributed environment. The presentation also explains how Newton* not only provides scale out but adds other benefits including automated deployment, dynamic resilience and simplified administration using a document driven approach.

* Note: Newton is now called the Paremus Service Fabric Community Edition.

- 30 slides
(0.3MB PDF)

OSGi in the Enterprise

October 2007

A 30 minute introduction to OSGi™ - the dynamic module system for Java - presented to the NYJavaSIG.

OSGi™ has been described as "one of the quiet contenders for the most important technology of the decade" by SD Times. This mature, dynamic, component standard has been around since 1999, and is now looking like becoming the model of choice for realizing the SOA dream within the Enterprise.

This session will provide an overview of the technical fundamentals of OSGi with code examples of how to implement software using OSGi. Suggestions of the impact that OSGi is going to have on enterprise software in the short, medium and long terms will be provided. Finally the session will provide a demonstration of OSGi in action, using Infiniflow, an agile, scalable, robust runtime that not only supports OSGi composite applications such as Spring-OSGi and other composite applications, but is itself constructed from dynamically deployed OSGi components.

- 68 slides
(1.6MB PDF)

Delivering the SOA Holy Grail

October 2007

Award-winning 12-page paper presented at the SOA for E-Government conference.
Service Oriented Architecture, as commonly portrayed by the IT Industry, is uniquely ill-equipped to address the requirements of the next generation of distributed Enterprise and Utility runtime environments. True agility, self-assembling, self-healing, self-protecting, self-scaling solutions can only be achieved by implementing the next generation of composite SOA frameworks that are based upon the correct set of organizational principles.

Dr Richard Nicholson, CEO and Founder of Paremus, will review what these fundamental architectural design principles are, along with their origins, and explain how they have been realized by the Paremus Infiniflow Enterprise Service Fabric product suite.
This will include a review of two standards initiatives currently being aggressively pursued by the Enterprise Software industry, namely:

• OSGi™ - described as “one of the quiet contenders for the most important technology of the decade”, and
• SCA (Service Component Architecture).

- 17 slides
(1.2MB PDF)