Day 1, a beautiful sunny day, was reserved for business presentations. A lot of these presentations actually mentioned the same benefits, which makes a nice, consistent case for OSGi. Some of the bigger projects were funded research projects, and I was proud to see Martijn and Hans do a presentation and succesful demo of GX’s WebManager 9, an application that is commercially available and nicely shows the benefits of using OSGi in an enterprise content management environment.

Near the end of the day, we showed a demo of the L-iQ Provisioning Server. The interest was pretty overwhelming and we got to show it in action many times, doing demos for three hours straight. Our main demo showed Apache Felix and a simple paint program which visualizes the dynamics nicely.

We ended the evening with a couple of beers on the roof of our hotel with some people from ICW who were staying at the same hotel.

Day 2, still sunny but cooler, started with a keynote by Peter Kriens who took a long trip down memory lane, going back to the days at Ericsson where he first started on what later became OSGi. He ended with a small peek into the future and ended by stating the mission of the OSGi alliance now, which is to become THE component framework.

Later in the day we had presentations on several topics. There were two parallel tracks so I could not even attend everything. A talk on JOnAS 5 gave an overview on the architecture of the first open source, OSGi based application server and how they can dynamically load and unload services. They already use iPOJO, OBR and have a componentized EJB 3 implementation called EasyBeans. Michael Keith from Oracle explained how JPA was adapted to work on OSGi and wondered why there was not yet a standardized persistence solution for OSGi. Jan and Markus gave an interesting talk on the Eclipse Communication Framework and R-OSGi, explaining how they can do all types of distributed services. The Enterprise Expert Group will also address this soon, and we briefly talked to Eric Newcomer about that. Richard did a nice overview of iPOJO, going through over 100 slides in 45 minutes while still making a lot of sense. iPOJO is definitely the dependency and component management solution for the future, as soon as it gets an API so we can use it instead of our dependency manager.