About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Enterprise OSGi in Action is captioned a “Man from Slovania.” This illustration is taken from a recent reprint of Balthasar Hacquet’s Images and Descriptions of Southwestern and Eastern Wenda, Illyrians, and Slavs, published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2008. Hacquet (1739–1815) was an Austrian physician and scientist who spent many years studying the botany, geology, and ethnography of many parts of the Austrian Empire, as well as the Veneto, the Julian Alps, and the western Balkans, inhabited in the past by peoples of many different tribes and nationalities. Hand-drawn illustrations accompany the many scientific papers and books that Hacquet published.

Slavonia is a historical region in eastern Croatia. Part of the Roman Empire until the fifth century, then part of Pannonian Croatia, subsequently ruled by Hungary, the Ottomans, and the Hapsburgs, Slavonia was briefly an independent entity until it became a part of Yugoslavia after World War II. Today Slavonia encompasses five counties in inland Croatia with a population of almost one million inhabitants.