Tuesday, April 05, 2011

OSGi comes of age?

Early in my career at SpringSource, my colleagues presented me a T-shirt with "CICS does that!" printed on the front. However, nobody anticipated what that statement might eventually include.

IBM has just announced that the latest version of the CICS transaction monitor includes support for applications packaged as OSGi bundles. From the announcement letter:

The JVM server infrastructure with integrated OSGi support and tooling provides a new industry standard Java runtime environment in CICS.
[...] 
The JVM server environment supports the development and deployment of Java applications through the use of industry standard OSGi bundles. This will require Java applications to be packaged into an OSGi bundle, and then deployed as a CICS BUNDLE resource with reference to the OSGi bundle and its version, removing the need to load Java applications from a statically defined class path. This function will significantly improve the system management of Java applications in CICS through the provision of application isolation and versioning, cross-package prerequisite checking, and simplified package redeployment.
This is heart-warming news to me, both as an OSGi proponent and as a former member of the CICS development team. I'm guessing CICS is using Equinox as its OSGi framework, but I'm looking forward to reading the documentation for the details.
 

2 comments:

Zteve said...

Did you see also, in the CICS announcement: "Users with the appropriate prerequisite Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can use documentation, examples, and wizards in conjunction with the plug-in development environment to develop applications as a set of OSGi bundles and deploy them using the CICS bundle support in the SDK. This enhanced plug-in will significantly improve the development of new Java applications and accelerate the migration of existing Java applications to exploit the OSGi environment in a JVM server." ? -- which implies some tooling support for OSGI bundle creation!

Glyn said...

Sounds like they are using PDE.

Projects

OSGi (130) Virgo (59) Eclipse (10) Equinox (9) dm Server (8) Felix (4) WebSphere (3) Aries (2) GlassFish (2) JBoss (1) Newton (1) WebLogic (1)