Win Your Copy: OSGI in Action

Published by: Manning
ISBN: 1933988916

Reviewer Ratings

Relevance:
Readability:
Overall:

Buy it now

One Minute Bottom Line

So far four chapters of the book is available to the MEAP subscribers. The available chapters form most of the book's first part which intended to introduce OSGI to readers. The chapters have acheived the goal that authors set for them very well. I was well familiar with OSGI Module layer before reading the available four chapters and now I can certainly say that the content provided in these chapters are unique in the quality. Reading these chapters further enhanced my knowledge on OSGI Module layer and service layer. I recommend this book to every serious Java developer which is involved or will be involved with modular architecture in general and OSGI in particular.

So far four chapters of the book is available to the MEAP subscribers. The available chapters form most of the book's first part which intended to introduce OSGI to readers. The chapters have acheived the goal that authors set for them very well. I was well familiar with OSGI Module layer before reading the available four chapters and now I can certainly say that the content provided in these chapters are unique in the quality. Reading these chapters further enhanced my knowledge on OSGI Module layer and service layer. I recommend this book to every serious Java developer which is involved or will be involved with modular architecture in general and OSGI in particular.

Review

The first chapter of every Mannig book that I read was some kind of introduction and was covering the background of the domain which book was going to cover. The OSGI in Action is not an exception and its first chapter explains why a framework like OSGI is important for Java community and how this framework fit in the big picture of application development using Java programming language.

The second chapter, Mastering Modularity, gradually introduces modularity and OSGI Module layer. The good point about the chapter is the way that it starts with explaining the modularity and the reason that modularity is important and its gradual move toward OSGI module layer, module description and modules dependencies. The authors introduces a sample program in this chapter which they further complete the software in each chapter. Chapter ends where its provided content make the readers ready to learn the OSGI service layer.

Welcome to the third chapter which is the longest chapter so far. This chapter is title Learning Lifecycle, and introduces the OSGI module life Lifecycle in a detailed manner. You can expect to see many sample code related to OSGI modules lifecyle and module management.This chapter introduces the OSGI module management API and use them in completing the "paint program".

Forth chapter, Studying Services, is what most of the readers are looking to understand in the beginning. The forth chapter starts in the same way that second chapter started, it gradually introduces the service concept and reasons for using services by providing very good illustrations. Later on author connect these concepts to OSGI service layer. Again you can see several sample code which shows how OSGI service layer works and how we can utilize OSGI framework API to manage the OSGI services lifecyle.

(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)

Comments

Abhay Bakshi replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 10:22am

I am a lucky winner of JBoss in Action book. This is a good idea too, and just like the following URL, need to include details for a reader on how to win a copy.

http://books.dzone.com/reviews/jboss-action

SAMPLE DETAILS TO INCLUDE ON THIS PAGE MAY LOOK LIKE:

A DZone and Manning FREE BOOK GIVE AWAY!

DZone and Manning have partnered to give away three free copies of OSGI In Action. In order to qualify, leave a comment at the end of this review describing your experience using OSGI-related technologies; or, feel free to provide your opinion about the book.

WeiLing replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 10:28am in response to: j2eecop

Thanks Abhay. Yes, I was just working on that :). Happy commenting everyone.

Cheers!

-Wei Ling

Abhay Bakshi replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 10:31am in response to: WeiLing

Thank you, Wei Ling, for taking care of us as DZone readers. :) Have a good day.

Vivek replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 10:55am

I havent really used OSGI yet but I have played with some examples on Eclipse Equinox platform. I just cant wait to read the book.

Thanks,

Vivek

Marcel Lanz replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 11:20am

I am using OSGI in one way or the other every day with eclipse.... and I'm suprised each time I have to "restart" my running eclipse to activate an installed plugin ;-)

bonapeti replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 11:31am

I am looking forward to read this book, it was high time to write a book like this.

Checking the table of contents I think Part I and II contains chapters which can be gathered from tutorials on the internet.

It starts getting exciting at chaper 9, 10: problems and dealing with legacy code.

I hope I'll be able to see something about Spring integration and other J2EE servers.

I can't wait to read this.

Peter

rawadmarji replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 11:31am

I would like to have more details about relation between OSGI and Spring

tejakantamneni replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 11:31am

Nice, Is that me who is going to get the book? Thanks for the nice offer..

Andrea Palmieri replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 11:45am

I don't have any experience with OSGI so I hope to get the book to get to know it

Richard D. Jackson replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 12:07pm

I'm in the process of trying to learn more about OSGi and the lack of good documentation is one of the major drawbacks at this point. So I'm really looking foward to this book getting completed so I can get a copy. What is really sorly missing is not so much documentation on the core stuff but things like the various additional services that are part of the specification. For instance Config Admin Service (One of the ones I'm playing with right now), Meta Type Service, OBR Service ect... I really hope they spend the time in this book going over the core stuff so that we can get a good grasp of the core features before moving on to things like spring and such.

Christopher Brind replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 12:15pm

I have a fair amount of OSGi experience and am looking forward to OSGi developments in the near future. However, something that OSGi missing is some independent books.

I believe I may have even reviewed the proposal for this book and have to say that I look forward to reading it - hopefully for free! :)

Cheers,

Chris

polireddy replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 1:01pm

I am a Senior Developer and I had the OSGI exposure in a recent training in my company. Was exited to learn the core concepts behind it.. I would love to read this book if got one for free. :) and will post my review.. -- Sarath

Stephane Arguin replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 1:03pm

I personally experimented and read about OSGI since a couple of years. Now, I'm trying to convince (or educate) our clients and development teams that designing some parts of our systems using OSGI will be good from a development and a maintenance point of view.

Maybe this book will give me more arguments and sample architectures that I will be able to explain to our teams.

Thanks

Stephane

bodhuin replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 1:51pm

I am a researcher that have done some studies on Services Container in Java (OSGi, RIO/Jini)

and found that these can solve many problems about how to cleanly separate software pieces called services

in small environment (Embedded use) and discover other services by metadataor interface definitions. RIO/Jini does it in a more distributed way.

I believe that including Services Container in Java 7 will be a big step if also dynamic distributed application is consider also. (http://bodhuin.blogspot.com/)

Web Services are just a set of technologies that regards distributed services but miss mainly the container (even if Java EE can be used also at this level).

We need basically a "light" services container inside Java (JRE) that considers security and distributed aspects in its roots.

I would be pleased to read the book mentioned to obtain more insights in the OSGi technology and notably in the intergation of OSGi technology with legacy code.

wesslan replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 2:41pm

OSGi is on my TODO-list but it certainly looks promising!

Guido Amabili replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 3:06pm

I designed recently a framework for doing some etl operations and my etl modules are osgi bundles......

But still need to know many basic things (like the fact that one can have more versions of a given bundle running in the container(felix in my case))

/GuidoLx

lechique replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 3:18pm

OSGI is everywhere! In cars (BMW), mobile devices, in your IDE, even in Spring! What is the point of using OSGI in all these things? Need to know and this book would be helpful.

pan.zupa replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 3:54pm

My experience with OSGi is rather small. I've been helping my colleague with implementing it in our work project. I have played with some bundles on Equinox and made some small-tutorial projects. I think OSGi is right way to solve some of development/design problems. I like that idea.

I am looking forward to read that book. Maybe I will be lucky to win free copy. That would be great!!

Bohdan Bobylak replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 4:17pm

OSGi is one of best technologies invented by developers for developers.
Since I tried to develop only simple OSGi applications it whould be gtreat to have a copy of the book.
It will definitely help me to improme my OSGi skills.

Thanks in advance,
Bohdan.

awadhiya replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 4:22pm

I have used Axis and Axis2 for past projects. Never got a chance to work with OSGi.

Robert Hicks replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 4:36pm

I have no idea what it OSGi is. Please cure my ignorance with the book. ;-)

jkilgrow replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 7:01pm

I am new to OSGi. I sort of know what it is but I have not yet started to use it. I need to do some more reading and see how it fits into my development projects. I could really use the Manning book. I have several other Manning books and they are great!! I hope I win!

r_sudh replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 9:54pm

I have done eclipse plugin development which is an OSGi based system. I'm looking forward to using Spring DM in developing an Eclipse RCP plugin. This should help me leverage Dependency Injection in an OSGi environment and also simplify managing OSGi services which are dynamic in nature. Also, it would love to win a free book on OSGi ;)

RachelAng replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 9:59pm

I am curious about OSGI framework and how it can help my developers on the projects they are working on. I am sure the book would give me more insight !

Donny A. Wijaya replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 10:21pm

Finally, Dzone offer a free book that caught my attention. I have feeling that this book is written by the OSGi experts for someone like me. So, when can I have my copy? :)

Setya replied on Wed, 2009/01/28 - 10:10pm

Hi,

I've been following OSGI since I use framework that's based on Equinox on daily basis, I hope this book will deepen my understanding of this technology.

Setya

anujmehta replied on Thu, 2009/01/29 - 1:29am

I came to know about OSGi thru Glassfish. Truly speaking I have no idea about OSGi but I am really eager to learn about it.

Karl Moore replied on Thu, 2009/01/29 - 1:45am

I've recently started to try building an application with OSGi. It's a very interesting subject and potentially extremely helpful, but currently you have to pick and choose your JARs. Some of the projects I wanted to use aren't OSGi compatible, so I either have to wait for the them to be upgrade, do it myself or go for another framework. SpringSource do have a maven repository with OSGi-ready libraries.

http://www.springsource.com/repository/app/

Christian Voller replied on Thu, 2009/01/29 - 2:32am

Have already some experience in OSGi. But it's always good, to get more info. I am especially interested in using OSGi in automation environment and SOA.

cretzel replied on Thu, 2009/01/29 - 2:54am

I think modularity is one of the most important issues with Java and OSGi targets this is an excellent way. But modularity is not the only thing that comes with OSGi. Another huge benefit is the support for service-orientation. I love it.