Knopflerfish OSGi

Knopflerfish 3.2 released

2011-07-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

Knopflerfish 3.2.0 has been released and is available for download at:
http://www.knopflerfish.org/download.html

Knopflerfish 3.2 is the second minor KF3 release and includes several improvement in the framework, the compendium services and the Knopflerfish services, resulting in a faster and more robust platform.

The most important new feature and fixes are:
- Refactored fragment handling and full support for dynamic fragments
- Improved handling of hanging bundle threads in start and stop methods,
- Bugfixes in Conditional Permission Admin
- Improved HTTP server, better handling persistent connections as well as handling DoS attacks
- Fixed stability issues in Component (SCR)
- Improved Android / Dalvik support
- New tutorials for Security and Android

The release notes includes a complete description of all fixes in 3.2
http://www.knopflerfish.org/releases/3.2.0/release_notes.html

Regards,
Christer

Running Knopflerfish with Security turned on

2011-07-13T01:25:00.000-07:00

For most users, the most common way of running Knopflerfish, or any OSGi container for that matter, is probably to run with security turned off. But in some contexts you need to turn security on. To overcome the set up hassle most users encounter the first time they get exposed to the ConditionalPermissionAdmin service in OSGi, and security in general in Java, we have created a hands on guide and tutorial on how to run Knopflerfish with Security turned On.

The small tutorial also includes some example bundles, including full sources. The examples are checked in to the KF SVN:
https://www.knopflerfish.org/svn/knopflerfish.org/trunk/osgi/bundles_examples/cpa/

/Christer

Knopflerfish is now on Twitter

2011-04-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

Knopflerfish is now on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/knopflerfish

Be sure to follow us for Knopflerfish Updates Great and Small.

Knopflerfish web site temporarily down

2011-03-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

The Knopflerfish web site is temporarily unavailable. This is due to a problem with the fiber connection. We estimate to have it up and running again tomorrow before lunch (CET).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

/Christer

Knopflerfish maven repository sees the light of day

2010-12-20T15:55:00.000-08:00

We today took the first steps to publish maven artifacts of the Knopflerfish OSGi framework and bundles when Gunnar created a maven2 repo at:
http://www.knopflerfish.org/maven2/

The repository holds the frameworks and bundles from recent KF releases (2.3.3, 2.4, 3.0, 3.1)

The convention used for group id and artifact id when creating the
artifacts for the Knopflerfish bundles is that the artifact id is the
last part of the bundle symbolic name (i.e., everything after the last
'.') and the group id the first part of the bundle symbolic name
(i.e., everything to the left of the last '.') .

Please note that the repo is still experimental.

More info and updates to follow.

Regards,
Christer

Knopflerfish in Enterprise OSGi - the Nimble Distribution

2010-12-13T14:48:00.000-08:00

Makewave and Paremus announced today the Nimble Distribution, Knopflerfish Edition.

As the name clearly indicates it is based on Knopflerfish OSGi. It also includes the Nimble resolver, remote services, as well as the Posh OSGi shell.

The press release has the full story.

Knopflerfish 3.1 released

2010-10-20T14:05:00.000-07:00

Knopflerfish 3.1 has been released and is available for download at:
http://www.knopflerfish.org/download.html

Knopflerfish 3.1 is the first minor KF3 release. KF3.1 includes several improvement in the framework, the compendium services and the Knopflerfish services, resulting in a faster and more robust platform.

The most important new feature and fixes are:

Updated framework with improved thread handling& asyncronous listeners.
Reduced bundle start-up time
Improved and faster log bundle
Several fixes and minor improvements in the desktop bundle

The release notes includes a complete description of all fixes in 3.1

Regards,
Christer

Comment moderation turned on

2010-08-13T02:50:00.000-07:00

Due to the increasing number of spam comments I decided to turn on comment moderation, at least for a while.

Regards,
Christer

Knopflerfish Pro 3 first OSGi framework to become 4.2 certified

2010-07-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

Today we received a note at Makewave from the OSGi Alliance stating Knopflerfish Pro 3 is certified for compliance against the OSGi Release 4, Version 4.2 specifications. In fact Knopflerfish Pro 3 is the first OSGi framework to be officially certified!

I want to use this opportunity to also thank all the Knopflerfish developers and users out there for all their hard work and enthusiasm in finalizing KF3 and getting us certified.

/Christer

Knopflerfish 3 Released

2010-06-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

Knopflerfish 3.0 is the next major version of Knopflerfish OSGi, designed to be compliant with the newly published OSGi R4 V4.2 specifications. KF3 fully implements the core and service compendium functions according to OSGi R4 v4.2. The KF3 overview page describes the development of KF3 in more detail. KF3 also includes several other improvements and fixes. The Release Notes includes the complete list of features and fixes.

With the release of KF3 the former main development branch (KF2), will enter maintenance mode. Before entering maintenance mode a KF 2.4 was built and released today. KF2.4 includes all fixes in the trunk since 2.3.3 and is probably the last minor release of KF2 (2.N.N). Maintenance releases (2.4.N) can still be expected.

Regards,
Christer

Knopflerfish 3 RC1 released

2010-06-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

Today we released Knopflerfish 3 RC1. This is the first release candidate of the upcoming KF3 release. The RC1 includes lots of minor fixes and some new features. A few highlights are:

HTTP Server handles proxy connections far better. Also added support for Content-Encoding: gzip
Desktop bundle recognizes Bundle-Icon manifest header: Bundle Selection is improved
TrayIcon update to use Java6 standard SystemTray and TrayIcon classes. This means you will get the KF TrayIcon on OSX and Linux desktops (KDE, Gnome) as well!

The official KF 3.0 release is now scheduled for public release on Mon 21 Jun 2010.

/Christer

Knopflerfish 3 beta-5 released, fully implementing OSGi R4 v4.2

2010-05-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

Today we released beta-5 of the upcoming KF3 release. With this beta-5 release KF3 now fully implements the core and service compendium functions according to OSGi R4 v4.2

Besides completing the 4.2 implementation Beta-5 includes several minor improvements. E.g. improved Event Admin, Desktop and Framework Commands bundles. The release notes has the full story.

One clearly visible change is of course the change to the Tango Icon set in the desktop and other bundles:

A final KF3 release is scheduled in a few weeks from now.

/Christer

Knopflerfish OSGi runs the ITS App Store for CVIS

2010-03-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying one week in Amsterdam at Intertraffic and the Cooperative Mobility Showcase. There the CVIS project has been on display, demonstrating a wide range of ITS services.

The Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) Project is one of Europe’s flagship projects for cooperative mobility, providing a universal platform for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication and services. This universal platform includes no less than Knopflerfish OSGi!

The CVIS architecture includes the concept of the "ITS App Store" with the full range of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure applications. This is all implemented in OSGi, which is ideally suited for such an environment where applications (bundles) are downloaded and executed on a vehicle device.

This week was really a stress test for Knopflerfish. There was more than 20 applications running at the same time, almost 150 bundles, all with the possibility to run in the background, exchanging data with vehicles as they passed by.

So where there no problems? Of course there were and after this show you realize why Apple has such a strict certification policy for apps in their app store. Knopflerfish is not flawless, but the vast majority of the problems was actually related to badly written apps (bundles). Once they were corrected the whole system performed were nicely.

Also as a comparison with the iPhone. They allow ONE app at a time, NO background processing. We had 25 apps, almost ALL doing background processing, receiving and sending data asynchronously.

Final word - be thread safe ;-)

/Christer - directly from Schiphol

KF3 / OSGi R4v4.2 well under way, beta-4 released, nighly builds available

2010-03-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

The development with KF3 is well under way and last week we released the fourth beta release of KF3.0. From an OSGi R4v4.2 point of view all main features are in place. The framework implements all 4.2 features as well as the fundamental Compendium Services. The main remaining work is to update Declarative Services / SCR to 4.2.

Since some time nightly builds are running for KF3. The results were unintentionally well hidden on the KF web site. This is now corrected and there is a link from the KF downloads section.

The direct link to KF3 nightly builds is:
http://www.knopflerfish.org/snapshots_branches_kf3/

/Christer

Knopflerfish tooltip - Using the desktop bundle to generate events

2009-11-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

A handy feature in the KF desktop is the ability to generate events "by hand".

In the desktop there is an "Events" tab that displays all the events received. There is a filter function to select a subset of events.

In this view you can also generate and send new events.

Clicking on "Send" will bring up the following dialog in which you can specify the event topic as well as any number of event properties.

In the example above pressing Send will send out an event using the EventAdmin service with the topic foo and the event property "bar" with the value 10.

This can be a very useful and handy function when testing or debugging an OSGi bundle that uses the EventAdmin service.

/Christer

Knopflerfish 3 beta-3 released - KF 3.0 gets closer!

2009-10-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Today Jan built and released the beta-3 version of KF3. Extension bundles are now fully implemented in the framework which means the KF beta-3 framework now fully implements OSGi R4 V4.2. Of the OSGi compendium, declarative services (SCR) only remains to be updated to V4.2. We plan to have SCR completed in a very near future, i.e. week(s) from now. KF3 is getting closer!

/Christer

The OSGi framework beauty contest in Ludwigsburg

2009-10-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the OSGi Users Group Germany meeting in Ludwigsburg. One of the sessions was an OSGi framework beauty contest between Knopflerfish (me), Felix (Karl Pauls + Felix Meschberger), Equinox (Jeff McAffer) and mBedded Server (Roman Roelofsen). I think it was a pretty good session, but difficult to judge from where I was sitting. Nor can I say there was a clear winner, except maybe for the OSGi technology itself which we all praised. I also got several comments afterwards that we all seemed so friendly to each other where they had expected us to be more aggressive. Well, if you put a Swiss, a Canadian and a Swede on stage you will not get a dog fight, you will get peace, love and understanding, unless it is ice-hockey.

I was impressed by the event itself, +50 people and generally a good quality of the sessions from what I could judge. That said from my somewhat limited understanding based on 6 years of German at school. But there is clearly a strong momentum around OSGi in Germany at the moment. No doubt about that. There were quite a bit of discussions on the tooling for OSGi, which I will get back to in another blog entry later.

In the evening I had a very nice Schwäbisches dinner together with 2 gentlemen from Deutsche Telekom, discussing, among many things, OSGi in the residential home gateway. Very interesting discussions which gave me some new ideas for the panel session I'm doing next week: Evolution of the "Digital Furnace": Residential Gateways and Set-top Boxes, at the Connections Summit 2010 on Nov 4th in Amsterdam. I hope to see you there!

/Christer

Knopflerfish at the OSGi Users Forum Germany Oct 27

2009-10-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

We've been invited to take part in a panel session at the OSGi Users Forum Germany meeting on the 27th of October in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

The panel will be a beauty contest between the major OSGi frameworks, comparing the pros and cons. I'm convinced this will be a very interesting panel discussion. We should actually have them more often at other OSGi events. The full agenda for the event is here.

Hope to see you there!

/Christer

Knopflerfish 3 beta-2 released

2009-10-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Knopflerfish 3 beta-2 has just been released. With this 2nd beta release the security parts of OSGi R4 v4.2 are implemented. What remains to reach full v4.2 compliance are some functions related to extension bundles and the 4.2 updates to declarative services.

More information on this release can be found in the release notes.

You can download KF3 beta-2 from here.

/Christer

2nd annual OSGi survey

2009-10-15T03:17:00.000-07:00

Kirk Knoernschild from the Burton Group is making a 2nd Annual OSGi Survey.

1o quick on-line questions. The actual survey is here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=YxNKaaoJDptcElhf83spFg_3d_3d

I hope you all know what to answer on question 5 ;-)

The result from last years survey can be found here:
http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2008/06/osgi-survey-res.html

/Christer

JavaFX and OSGi (Knopflerfish)

2009-10-06T00:20:00.000-07:00

Johan Vos over at Lodgon is doing interesting stuff with JavaFX and OSGi and has posted an entry in his blog where he describes how to launch Knopflerfish from within a JavaFX environment.

/Christer

Knopflerfish 3 branch available (OSGi 4.2)

2009-06-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

Knopflerfish 3 is the upcoming implementation of the OSGi 4.2 specification. A preview is now available.

Highlights include

the new launcher common for all OSGi frameworks.
(good news if you need to embed KF in your own application)
lazy bundle activation
...and of course updated OSGi API files

Currently there is no prebuilt distribution, but it's simple to build:

> svn co https://www.knopflerfish.org/svn/knopflerfish.org/branches/kf3/
> cd kf3
> ant all

We'll post progress on the KF3 work here and plan to release an alpha build soon

/Erik W

Knopflerfish on Android/Dalvik VM

2009-01-03T13:44:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Yuuki at Makewave Japan we got KF up and running on the Android/Dalvik VM platform. Also, full credits to the original work from Karl and Marcel at Luminis who figured out how to use the DexFile API about a year ago.

The images shows the KF http and text consoles running on the Android emulator.

As of revision 2624 in the KF trunk, the necessary code to install and start "dexified" bundles is added to the KF framework. Additionally, fixes have been done to the KF http server (actually, in the jsdk bundle to solve a bug in dalvik) to allow you to run a web server on Android.

The KF ant build system also contains support for adding the necessary classes.dex file to the framework and bundles.

Currently, we do not distribute such a dexified version, but you could build it yourself by downloading the Android SDK and building KF with

> ant -DANDROID_HOME=[path to android sdk installation dir]

you can then launch the framework (after pushing the necessary files to the emulator) using

> adb shell
# cd [kf_dir]
# dalvikvm -classpath framework.jar org.knopflerfish.framework.Main \
-xargs my.xargs

/E

Knopflerfish 2.2 released

2008-12-20T12:16:00.000-08:00

Knopflerfish 2.2. is now released and is available for download at:

http://www.knopflerfish.org/download.html

This is a maintenance release of Knopflerfish.

The main new feature in this release is the new Graph View in the
desktop. Another desktop change is that it is now completely
self-contained, just install and use it on any R4 framework.

We've made a few screen videos of the new graph view:

Starting the framework:

Starting/stopping/uninstalling bundles:

A short highlight of other features and fixes are:

Framework 4.0.11

The OS name alias handling is now up to date
An issue with paths in the BundleClassPath manifest header has been fixed
Fragment handling during uninstall
A possible deadlock between registerService and refreshPackages have been removed

Event admin 2.0.3

Improved error handling and logging

Http Service 2.1.1

The actual port of a HttpService instance (specified with port 0) is now presented as a service property

Framework commands 2.0.5

Support for specifying an arbitrary filer expression added to several of the commands
The call command no longer requires the service implementation class to be public

Comm-win32 2.0.1

Added Windows Vista as supported osname

The release notes have the complete list of features and fixes:

Enjoy!

/Gunnar, Christer, Erik

Unexpected blog post

2008-12-18T02:18:00.001-08:00

Some of you might have noticed a seemingly non-OSGi, non-KF related, Swedish-language entry on this blog, mostly containing band photos.

It was totally unrelated to OSGi. I mistakenly posted my latest entry intended for my photo blog Obsessive Username Disorder on the KF blog.

The entry is now removed, but feel free to read the OUD blog too :)

/E

New graph view in the KF desktop

2008-12-12T06:19:00.000-08:00

Available as of revision 2598. It's actually pretty useful, not only cool. Try it out by downloading the latest night build from

http://www.knopflerfish.org/snapshots/current_trunk

...and select "Graph" from the view menu. Nodes are bundles. The left side shows packages imports and exports, the right side shows services. Exports are drawn upwards in the graph, imports downward.

Double-click on nodes moves to another bundle (using animation)
Right-click shows a popup menu with some common operations
The faded icons on the bottom are the bundle history.

Also, we've made the desktop bundle completely standalone, so you can now easyly install it in any OSGi framework. (try it on Eclipse Ganymede with approximate 240 bundles!)

/E

Knopflerfish OSGi on the iPod Touch/iPhone 2.1

2008-09-14T09:08:00.001-07:00

Well, I don't have any iPhone, but I do have an iPod touch. I'm happy to report that Knopflerfish OSGi runs well on the newly released 2.1 firmware and JamVM 1.5.1.

Quite fun, for being a Sunday. The somewhat hard part was to jailbreak my ipod touch. Then you just install JamVM, copy the usual Knopflerfish directory and do a "java -jar framework.jar"

The snapshots below show the KF http and tty consoles.

/E

Desktop Preferences editor

2008-09-13T06:02:00.000-07:00

As of revision 2498, there's a new display in the Swing Desktop: a Preferences editor. It displays and edits both Java java.util.prefs and OSGi org.osgi.service.prefs.

Grab if from the latest trunk release!

/E

P.S. To actually implement the prefs editor, we sneaked in a part of the R4.1 spec, namely the Bundle.getBundleContext() method. For the curious, this was because no admin service was defined to the OSGi prefs API, thus making it necessary to grab other bundle's context (yeah, with the appropriate permisson). Still, the prefs editor will work on older/other frameworks (including the big four) thanks to some reflection hacks :)

Knopflerfish OSGi on the iPhone

2008-08-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

We have reports of KF running on the iPhone (firmware 2.0.2 + JamVM 1.5)! The photo shows the KF HTTP admin UI up and running.

/E

Update 2008-08-31: We just got two more screenshots of KF on the iPhone (thanks Yuuki!):

the TTY console and the HTTP console, click for larger views

Desktop event displayer

2008-08-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

We're working on making the Knopflerfish graphical desktop better! The first step, available as of build 2482, is support for framework events. Now any event topic can be displayed in a manner similar to the log view.

Yes, multiple event views may be open at the same time, listening to different topics and filters. Also, events can be manually entered and posted (even using an existing event as a template):

It's available in the desktop bundle version 2.1.0, which should run on your OSGi framework of choice.

Do try it out.

/Erik W

P.S. Yeah, you can use the trunk's bundle repository for even easier install.

Welcome to the Knopflerfish blog

2008-06-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

...because it feels much easier to blog :)

and, yes, there's a new KF 2.10 release as well as new logo!

/E