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

Knopflerfish 2.2 released

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

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

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