Geleitwort

In November 2007 I was asked to review the book you are now reading. A book about OSGi, the technology that has been such a significant part of my life since we started to work on the specifications in November 1998. Initially a small team of people from Sun, Ericsson, and IBM working closely together (well, most of the time), later with the help of many more companies. Why did it take nine years for the first book to appear for a technology that is so obviously becoming very relevant today?

Well, OSGi has long been a solution waiting for a problem. The problem we were given in November 1998 was to come up with a software standard for home gateways with the express goal of allowing independent service providers to execute code on that platform. Superficially, home gateways and service providers seem far removed from Enterprise and Desktop Applications. However, the advent of open source has created a situation that closely resembles this early collaborative software model. Today, developers compose applications from libraries they get from all over the place, without any communication and synchronization between all the development teams. Such a model requires the components to be as loosely coupled as possible, and that is exactly the same problem we had to solve in 1998. We were given the time to do it right by key people that recognized the importance of this technology. This first book about OSGi technology is therefore a proud milestone for us.

So when I was asked to review the book I immediately said yes. After this commitment they told me it was in German. I guess as a native Dutch speaker I should have some affinity with the German language, but then they told me almost 400 pages had to be reviewed. Between christmas and new year I struggled (without Internet connectivity) with a PDF and a German-English dictionary somewhere in a lost part of France. Thankfully, the subject is well known to me, and it quickly became a pleasure to read the interpretations and explanations of the specifications with which I am so intricately familiar.

This book is a thorough introduction into the OSGi specifications which I recommend to anybody that wants to get into OSGi technology. Obviously I think that the specification is very good, but this book goes much further by providing many examples and elucidating the specification with interesting background information. I do hope the authors will translate this book in English so that it will become available to an even larger audience than the German market. It is worth it. The only problem I have with the book is that I have not written it myself ...

To the reader, I do wish you success with reading this book. It is a solid entry into the wonderful world of modularity in Java and service oriented programming. Though the threshold is sometimes steep, the results are worth it and this book will be the best way to cross that threshold.

Peter Kriens

OSGi Technical Director