While at the Eclipse Runtime Summit, I had the chance to talk with Iona's Eric Newcomer (CTO of Iona, Co-Chair, Enterprise Expert Group, OSGi Alliance, and well respected enterprise coding guy) about the emergence of OSGi as a server-side, or enterprise technology.

We discuss how OSGi came to be a technology of interest in the enterprise space, and move on to the formation of the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. Eric goes through a high level list of what the "enterprise" here means: mostly the usual suspects of security, adding distributed functionality, messaging, scalability, and performance.

I ask Eric about the process that the OSGi Alliance uses and we discuss the interesting role of the full time spec writer that the OSGi Alliance uses. As Eric outlines, there's a process pretty similar to the JCP process, where the deliverables are a specification, a reference implementation, and TCKs to verify implementations.

We then discuss the overall idea of componentizing Java - what OSGi bundles and modules seek to do. As the Java world is pretty well split between Sun and OSGi's ambitions here, we touch on Eric's thoughts there and a little bit of the historic background between the two parties.

Finally, we end up with a rough road-map for the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group and Eric's thoughts on the Eclipse Runtime Summit we'd both just attended.

Thanks again to Eric for the interview ;>

Disclaimer: Eclipse is a client and sponsored this video. Iona is also a client.