Wednesday February 27th, starting at 18:30, the NL-JUG [1] and luminis [2] host a University Session [3] about OSGi [4] in the Van der Valk Hotel De Biltsche Hoek. If you are a member of the NL-JUG, you can register for this session for free. If not, a membership is only 29,75 euros.

The OSGi specifications lend themselves well as a platform for loosely coupled and extensible applications; rapidly gaining ground as a standard dynamic component and service model for a broad range of applications and are recently becoming mainstream with projects like Eclipse and Spring. Originating from an embedded background you now see it being used on the desktop all the way up to the application server.

The Apache Felix [5] project has made these specifications easily available for other Apache projects, potentially providing a standard Apache component model. Several projects have started using Felix and many are considering using OSGi technology. Building your application on top of the OSGi framework provides tremendous benefits but there is a learning curve. The dynamic model (you can replace a component on the fly without restarting the VM!) as well as the strict classloading rules can be daunting at first.

We start with a short introduction that covers the creation of bundles and give an overview of dependency management. During the course of the session, we will provide several examples that shows the various features of OSGi. Topics that will be covered include:

• setting up a development environment (including debugging),
• packaging bundles (JARs),publishing and using OSGi services,
• common design patterns and pitfalls.

Visit http://www.nljug.org/osgi/ [6] for more information.