Knopflerfish Pro 3 first OSGi framework to become 4.2 certified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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