OSGi is today used in many places, for desktop applications, complex application servers and even for web applications. But what about portlets?
In the last weeks I developed some portlets for our product offerings. The portlets allow you to display, edit and manage content inside a JSR 286 (portlet API 2.0) compliant portal server. As our whole product offering is based on OSGi for the obvious reasons, I thought about using the same technology for implementing the portlets.
By using the great Apache Felix implementation, togther with some of the nice things we developed in the Apache Sling project I could easily manage to start the OSGi framework inside the portlet web application. A simple generic portlet implementation running outside the OSGi world receives the portlet calls, like events, actions and render invocations. This generic portlet just forwards them to a receiving portlet running as an OSGi service. Once you are inside the OSGi world you can use all the benefits of OSGi for your implementation and it was quite simple to develop the “real” portlets. Besides using the same base for all of our products and being able to reuse stuff through well defined bundles and services, one of the main advantages during development has been the easy update of the portlet code. While the whole portal application has been deployed to some portal container, updating the portal did not require an update/redeployment of the portal web application. Just updating a bundle through OSGi is enough and your new code is deployed. This makes the development and testing way faster.
I really don’t want to miss OSGi in everyday development, it creates clear boundaries, enables real modularization and reuse and makes the development much easier. Start your server once and just update the parts that have changed. No need to restart, no need to update the whole application. Priceless!

It’s over 🙁 We spent 15 beautiful days on the islands (Oahu, Kaui, Big Island, and Maui) and it really was a remarkable vacation. There’s a lot to see and each island is different. But…sigh…that’s over now.
Yesterday night we started our long trip back home and now arrived at LAX. Later today we’ll fly from here to Frankfurt and than back to good old Paderborn.

ApacheCon is over – as you can read everywhere it was – as always – a great conference. Congratulations to everyone involved! For some reason or the other I couldn’t enjoy it this time as much as the last times, but that’s how things are sometimes.
In addition my wife and I have a very tight schedule, so we left New Orleans friday afternoon to enjoy the full weekend in Disneyland in sunny LA. Unfortunately our flight out of New Orleans was delayed by two hours so we arrived at LAX around midnight. Picking up the rental car, driving to Anaheim, and checking in took some time, so we managed to get to bed around 2 in the morning 🙁 But we also managed to be early in the park today nevertheless 🙂
The wheather here is way too hot for me – and someone told me in New Orleans that it would be freezing cold in LA (thanks Ralph). But I guess it’s better to have high temperatures than rain, so we’re happy.
I’ll be working out of our New Port Beach office from monday to wednesday, before our real vacation starts on thursday where we will be traveling even further to the west…

Hurray, I’m finished with my Richards talk about OSGi and Apache Felix. I’m very happy and proud to step in for Richard who originally submitted this talk and got accepted but wasn’t able to attend.
I think, in the end it went very well, there were several intesting questions and it seems that the interest in OSGi is really high – I submitted a practical talk for ApacheCon EU next year. Let’s see if I get selected!
Reflecting the talk, I have the feeling that people might got my comments about Spring DM wrong. Just to clarify, I love Spring and it does a great job (there are some things I would like to have different, but I guess that’s always the case). Spring DM is a great thing and they’re doing a great job; I really like it especially the testing stuff. But compared to declarative services it is more a heavy weight solution – heavy weight is not bad by itself, so there is nothing wrong here. In the past years I never had the use case for this, I’m really happy with the simplicity of declarative services and the Apache Felix SCR plugin. That’s all 🙂

I’m really wondering what happened to the great news section on the site where you could immediately read about new releases. And the new download “process” is really really annoying. It requires way too many clicks to get what you want 🙁

So go grab them at our booth here at the ApacheCon in New Orleans as long as they’re hot…

This is day one of the conference part of the ApacheCon US in New Orleans. As always it’s a very busy conference full of stuff to hear or talk about. Today is the Fast Feather Track which kicked of very well attended, although it’s not that easy to find (it’s next to napoleon A2 for all those still wandering around….) I really like this concept as it contains a wild collection of sometimes unrelated topics. It comes with the advantage of learning about stuff you might have never looked at by yourself.
Unfortunately the second part of the Fast Feather Track is not attended very well. And I’m wondering why this is the case 🙁 The talks are really interesting. And I’m pretty sure that the poor attendence is not correlated to the topics. I guess it’s more that people did not really realize that there is a FFT and perhaps they wanted to attend longer sessions.
The final talk for today about QPid will start at 17:30 – so don’t miss the last part of the FFT!
Finally a big thanks to all speakers of the FFT. I really hope you didn’t get too annoyed about the poor attendence. You did a great job!

Now, if you’ve ever heard me talking about programming languages and my preferences in this area, you might know that I really hate javascript. And it is really disgusting that most code you have to write for today’s web applications happens to be javascript (with a little bit html and a lot of brain bursting css). How do we poor developers deserve this? I really don’t know – and I really don’t understand why nobody is doing something against this.
In the past years I used (was forced to use) various javascript libs. Btw, why are there so many overlapping javascript libraries? People are mocking about the huge number of java web application frameworks, but nearly noone is mocking about too many javascript libs. It’s a strange world after all (or was it a small world? hmm).
Now, eventually, a good friend and collegue, Felix, mentioned jQuery as an alternative. I always thought that our Sling slogan “Bringing back the fun” is the greatest slogan on earth, but jQuery’s “write less. do more” is even more intriguing. As I wanted to do some ui updates on the Apache Felix web console, I read the jQuery tutorials, looked at the examples, read the api docs etc.
And I’m really impressed – well, it’s still javascript..sigh – but the approach is very appealing and I managed to get something running in a very short time frame. For instance, adding sorting to a table is just one line of code. You “attach” the table sorter plugin to the already existing html table. And that’s it. So if you start with POH (plain old html) improving your ui with jQuery is really simple and easy. Amazing.
So I can only suggest everyone to take a look. I didn’t do that much so far with jQuery, so I can’t tell that much atm. Currently it seems that the docs are partially outdated and there is an unbelievable amount of plugins which I think is the same mess as the eclipse plugins. It’s really hard to tell which plugins are useful or what they do and even harder to decide if this is a good and active plugin. But I guess this will improve over time.

Ok, this actually happend now nearly a month ago, but I never managed to blog in the past weeks (or was it months?) Ray played the last concert of his “Accoustic Genesis” tour in the world famous town of Paderborn (were I happen to live) – for those people not knowing Ray: he’s the singer of Skiltskin (with the famous song Inside) and used to be the front man of Genesis after Phil left.
Anyways, the concert was great. I’m not really a fan of accoustic music but Ray and his friend were really amazing. The played some Genesis/Gabriel/Collins/Others songs – sometimes in very interesting versions – and a lot of Ray’s songs (which were unknown to me but good as well). So it was a very pleasant evening with a very talented singer and guitar player. If you ever have the chance to see him live , just do it and buy him a Jaegermeister afterwards 🙂

Today is a great day to celebrate a birthday…