Preface

When I started working with OSGi technology back in 2000, I would’ve never guessed I’d still be working with it a decade later. Back then, OSGi was targeting the embedded market niche, but that wasn’t my area of interest. I wanted to create highly dynamic, modular applications, and OSGi gave me the possibility of doing so. At the time, there weren’t any freely available OSGi framework implementations; so I started working on my own open source implementation, called Oscar, back in December 2000 while I was working at Free University Berlin. Oscar moved with me when I moved to Grenoble to work at Josef Fourier University, where the work really started to flourish.

As OSGi technology began to gain traction, Oscar moved to the ObjectWeb open source consortium in 2004, and later it evolved into Felix at the Apache Software Foundation in 2005. I was fortunate enough to be invited by the OSGi Alliance to work directly on the OSGi specifications for the R4 release cycle in 2004. I’ve been involved in the OSGi specification process ever since, initially as an academic researcher and most recently in industry, when I took a position on the GlassFish team at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corp.) in 2008. A lot has changed over the last 10 years.