This has been a really good week for the EclipseRT runtime strategy. There were three announcements that indicate we are making good progress for establishing Eclipse as a community for creating innovative runtime technology based on OSGi.
1. Project Virgo was announced and proposed this week by SpringSource. As Mike and Adrian have described, this an important step towards making it easier for enterprise developers to adopt OSGi and EclipseRT technology. Project Virgo plus Project Gemini (proposed by Oracle and SpringSource) bring to Eclipse all of the key reference implementations for the OSGi Enterprise specifications. If you consider the fact that Jetty is already an EclipseRT project, then the runtime story is looking really good.
2. Yesterday, Heiko Seeberger from WeigleWilczek proposed to bring the existing ScalaModules project to Eclipse. I believe the future of OSGi needs to include support for other languages. Right now, OSGi is too tightly tied to Java. I see this support for Scala and the e4 work on JavaScript bundles as an important part of the future for EclipseRT and OSGi. I would love to see support for other languages at Eclipse? Ideas and contributors are welcome.
3. Jeff McAffer announced his Equinox and OSGi book has been sent to the printers. I realize there are other OSGi books that have been published. However, my feeling is we need more. We need to make it easier for developers to understand and adopt OSGi, books are a key tool to make this happen. Congrats to Jeff, Simon and Paul for adding to their book to the mix.
Three key announcements that point to nice momentum for EclipseRT. I also think there are more good things coming. EclipseCon will be an exciting time for EclipseRT and OSGi.
