The Apache Felix Maven SCR Plugin is a great tool to ease the development of OSGi components and services. Components and services are defined through annotations and the plugin creates the necessary descriptors for the OSGi Declarative Services, Config Admin and Metatype services. Starting with version 1.4.0 of the plugin, OSGi Declarative Services versions 1.0 and 1.1 are supported.

Introduction

In OSGi based systems functionality is mainly provided through services. Unlike traditional systems but comparable to Spring, a service is not reqiured to implement a framework defined interface. Instead services implement one or more interfaces, which stipulate the type of service provided. It is the lifetime of the bundle, which defines the lifetime of the service: A service object may be instantiated when the bundle is started and will automatically be removed when the bundle is stopped (and the service has not already been unregistered).

On larger projects, additional dependencies often tend to creep into a POM as the number of dependencies grow. As dependencies change, you are often left with dependencies that are not being used, and just as often, you may forget to declare explicit dependencies for libraries you require. Because Maven 2.x includes transitive dependencies in the compile scope, your project may compile properly but fail to run in production. Consider a case where a project uses classes from a widely used project such as Jakarta Commons BeanUtils. Instead of declaring an explicit dependency on BeanUtils, your project simply relies on a project like Hibernate that references BeanUtils as a transitive dependency. Your project may compile successfully and run just fine, but if you upgrade to a new version of Hibernate that doesn’t depend on BeanUtils, you’ll start to get compile and runtime errors, and it won’t be immediately obvious why your project stopped compiling.

Read mote at Sonatype Blog

Participation in Independent Foundation Projects Helps Spark Developer Co-Innovation Supporting Standards and Customer and Partner Open Source Strategies

VIENNA, Austria - October 27, 2009 - Reaffirming its increasing commitment to proven and broadly used open source technologies, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) joins a number of projects at the Apache Software Foundation, an independent foundation focused on open-source software projects. Working together with the Apache community of developers and users, SAP plans to further support the development and use of open solutions to drive industry standards and empower the developer community with the tools they need to be successful. The announcement was made at SAP® TechEd 2009, the company's largest ecosystem education event, being held October 27-29 in Vienna, Austria.

The Apache Software Foundation is an independent organization encouraging developers, users and technology vendors to contribute to its collaborative, consensus-based development process that strives to deliver high quality, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. SAP intends to contribute to several additional projects, including the Maven, VXQuery, Tomcat, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ projects, in an effort to enhance these technologies for use in future releases of the SAP NetWeaver® Application Server component.

Read complete press release

Even if the sample is quite small (600 responses), it still interesting going through these compiled data

Some time ago we ran a survey asking a few questions about the build process, specifically the tools that are used to do incremental builds and how much time those builds take. We had over 600 responses, so now it’s time to count the results.

This is the first time that we’ve published results on the incremental build process, so the information is more likely to serve as a guide than an authoritative information source.

Read More here

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