Eclipse Foundation Announces Support for
OSGi Service Platform R4 Specification

Eclipse Equinox Project to support OSGi community at Eclipse

OTTAWA, October 11, 2005 — The Eclipse Foundation today announced immediate support of the recently released OSGi Service Platform R4 specification. Eclipse and the OSGi Alliance collaborated extensively on the development of the OSGi Service Platform R4 specification, resulting in Eclipse Equinox and the OSGi Service Platform R4 reference implementation using the same code. The Eclipse Platform project has been based on the OSGi framework for the past two years and the project team has been tracking and actively participating in the specification process.

Eclipse also announced that the Eclipse Equinox Project will be restructured to support and promote an OSGi developer community at Eclipse. The Eclipse Equinox Project delivers a standalone version of the OSGi R4 framework, which had been previously embedded in the Eclipse 3.1 platform release. This will simplify development and deployment of rich client, embedded and server applications and facilitate the implementation of new and innovative OSGi-based services and mechanisms.

“The OSGi specification has proven to be an exemplary standard to use for the Eclipse component model,” explained Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The OSGi framework provides the APIs, component-level version control and dependency tracking that allows Eclipse RCP to be a dynamic runtime environment. These facilities are essential to making Eclipse RCP a viable and extensible platform for creating rich client applications. ”

The Eclipse Equinox Project will enable the OSGi developer community to participate and contribute to the implementation of the Eclipse OSGi framework and OSGi service implementations. It will also give OSGi consumers easy access to an open source, production quality framework implementation. The Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) will be enhanced to fully support the development and deployment of OSGi bundles.

“Eclipse has been an important partner of the OSGi Alliance,” said Dr. John Barr, President OSGi Alliance, and Director, Standards Realization, Corporate Offices, Motorola, Inc. “The Eclipse community has been working closely with members of the OSGi Alliance to review and implement the R4 Core Specification. This has been extremely significant for the development of the new specification. The large Eclipse install base is also a great example of the appeal for the types of applications that can be enabled with an OSGi platform.”

The upcoming OSGi Developer Forum and World Congress in Paris, France (October 11-14, 2005) will be an additional venue for expanded information about this partnership. Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich will be giving a keynote address at the event titled, “Accelerating OSGi Adoption.” Other prominent Eclipse-related sessions at the OSGi World Congress include:

• Jeff McAffer, IBM and Eclipse Equinox and RCP Lead – “Deploying OSGi Technology on an Eclipse Platform Eclipse as a Rich Client Platform & Programming an OSGi Application with Eclipse."
• Mikaël Desertot, University of Grenoble – “An Open Source OSGi Plug-In for Eclipse”
• Ted Habeck and Marco Pistoia, IBM – “Enabling Java 2 Runtime Security with Eclipse.”

More information about the conference can be found at: http://www.osgicongress.com/.

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