Java Reference
In-Depth Information
appendix B
The OSGi ecosystem
This appendix explains where
OSG
i came from, who owns it, and where it's going.
It also gives an overview of the various
OSG
i specifications and how they relate to
each other.
B.1
The OSGi Alliance
OSG
i as a technology is
owned
by the
OSG
i Alliance, a nonprofit industry consortium
funded by a large number of member companies. The
OSG
i Alliance is responsible
for developing and releasing
OSG
i standards, as well as maintaining Compliance Test
suites for the standards that they create. Importantly, the
OSG
i Alliance also ensures
that reference implementations for the various standards are available under reason-
ably business-friendly software licenses, but typically it doesn't maintain them. The
ongoing maintenance and development of
OSG
i specification implementations typ-
ically resides with the open source project or company that created them. Most
OSG
i
standards have more than one implementation available.
The
OSG
i Alliance is organized into a number of different
Expert Groups
. An
Expert Group consists of a number of
OSG
i experts from various
OSG
i Alliance
member companies who are interested in particular applications of
OSG
i. These
experts meet regularly to discuss bugs, new requirements, potential new specifica-
tions, and specification drafts. Of the several Expert Groups within the alliance, two
are particularly relevant to enterprise
OSG
i developers. These are the Core Plat-
form Expert Group (
CPEG
) and the Enterprise Expert Group (
EEG
).
T
HE
C
ORE
P
LATFORM
E
XPERT
G
ROUP
CPEG
's purview is, unsurprisingly, the core
OSG
i platform.
CPEG
's role is to guide the
growth of the
OSG
i framework, and it also provides a small level of oversight to the
other Expert Groups.
CPEG
introduces comparatively few standards into the core,
primarily because only broad use cases need support within the Core Specification,
but also because there's a significant effort made to keep the core platform small.
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