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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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