BusinessWire
October 11, 2005 05:43 AM US Pacific Timezone

Eclipse Foundation Announces Support for OSGi Service Platform R4 Specification; Eclipse Equinox Project to support OSGi community at Eclipse

OTTAWA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 11, 2005--The Eclipse Foundation today announced immediate support of the recently released OSGi Service Platform R4 specification. Eclipse and the OSGi Alliance collaborated extensively on the development of the OSGi Service Platform R4 specification, resulting in Eclipse Equinox and the OSGi Service Platform R4 reference implementation using the same code. The Eclipse Platform project has been based on the OSGi framework for the past two years and the project team has been tracking and actively participating in the specification process.

Eclipse also announced that the Eclipse Equinox Project will be restructured to support and promote an OSGi developer community at Eclipse. The Eclipse Equinox Project delivers a standalone version of the OSGi R4 framework, which had been previously embedded in the Eclipse 3.1 platform release. This will simplify development and deployment of rich client, embedded and server applications and facilitate the implementation of new and innovative OSGi-based services and mechanisms.

"The OSGi specification has proven to be an exemplary standard to use for the Eclipse component model," explained Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "The OSGi framework provides the APIs, component-level version control and dependency tracking that allows Eclipse RCP to be a dynamic runtime environment. These facilities are essential to making Eclipse RCP a viable and extensible platform for creating rich client applications. "

The Eclipse Equinox Project will enable the OSGi developer community to participate and contribute to the implementation of the Eclipse OSGi framework and OSGi service implementations. It will also give OSGi consumers easy access to an open source, production quality framework implementation. The Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) will be enhanced to fully support the development and deployment of OSGi bundles.

"Eclipse has been an important partner of the OSGi Alliance," said Dr. John Barr, President OSGi Alliance, and Director, Standards Realization, Corporate Offices, Motorola, Inc. "The Eclipse community has been working closely with members of the OSGi Alliance to review and implement the R4 Core Specification. This has been extremely significant for the development of the new specification. The large Eclipse install base is also a great example of the appeal for the types of applications that can be enabled with an OSGi platform."

The upcoming OSGi Developer Forum and World Congress in Paris, France (October 11-14, 2005) will be an additional venue for expanded information about this partnership. Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich will be giving a keynote address at the event titled, "Accelerating OSGi Adoption."

Other prominent Eclipse-related sessions at the OSGi World Congress include:

-- Jeff McAffer, IBM and Eclipse Equinox and RCP Lead - "Deploying OSGi Technology on an Eclipse Platform: Eclipse as a Rich Client Platform and Programming an OSGi Application with Eclipse"

-- Mikael Desertot, University of Grenoble - "An Open Source OSGi Plug-In for Eclipse"

-- Ted Habeck and Marco Pistoia, IBM - "Enabling Java 2 Runtime Security with Eclipse"

More information about the conference can be found at: http://www.osgicongress.com/.

About OSGi Alliance

The OSGi Alliance and its members specify, create, advance, and promote wide industry adoption of an open delivery and management platform for application services in home, commercial buildings, automotive and industrial environments. The OSGi Alliance serves as the focal point for a collaborative ecosystem of service providers, developers, manufacturers, and consumers. The OSGi specifications define a standardized, component oriented, computing environment for networked services. OSGi technology is currently being delivered in products and services shipping from several Fortune 100 companies.

The OSGi Alliance's horizontal software integration platform is ideal for both vertical and cross-industry business models within home, vehicle, mobile and industrial environments. As an independent non-profit corporation, the OSGi Alliance also provides for the fair and uniform creation and distribution of relevant intellectual property - including specifications, reference implementations, and test suites - to all its members. More information about the Alliance can be found at http://www.osgi.org.

About the Eclipse Foundation

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse Platform.

The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects. Full details of Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation are available at www.eclipse.org.

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