OSGi Tooling BOF @ EclipseCon

January 28, 2009 | 2 min Read

I’m so filled with joy that we’re going to have an OSGi Tooling BOF at EclipseCon this year. Here’s what we have for the abstract so far:

OSGi development tooling is the next big challenge for the adoption of OSGi in the enterprise. There are a number of great tools out there: PDE, BND, Maven, Sigil etc but little coherency between them. The OSGi Alliance has arranged a Tools Summit after EclipseCon and this BOF is a chance for people to come and raise any comments, criticisms and suggestions around OSGi development tooling prior to this summit.

The BOF is being organized by David Savage, Peter Kriens and I. For those who don’t know, there’s quite a bit of fragmentation in the OSGi tooling space. PDE has been tooling OSGi forever but has some baggage and an Equinox specific focus that some peole don’t like. More importantly, it’s not as extensible as I would like it to be. There are also some other newcomers that are starting to explore the OSGi tooling space. They take some different approaches but I think we can all work together.

I have a dream that we would all build on the same OSGi tooling stack… reuse technologies where they make sense (e.g., why isn’t PDE using BND for manifest generation?), there’s no excuse to reinvent the wheel. We all want to see OSGi succeed.

If you have any comments on what should be discussed at the BOF, please comment on the submission.