EclipseCon/OSGi DevCon Boston 2013 Wrap up

Now that I'm back home from EclipseCon / OSGi DevCon Boston 2013 I wanted to write a little wrap up post on the whole experience. For starters I'd like to thank the organizing committee at the Eclipse Foundation and the OSGi Alliance for all of their hard work to put together the event. Starting from the tutorial day through three days crammed packed with talks the whole experience was wonderful.

On Monday evening the event organizers made a meeting room available for Apache Karaf users to meet up and share use case stories, concerns, and talk about projects we've deployed on Karaf. A couple recurring themes popped up, including: Raspberry Pi support, better P2 integration, and more tutorials on using Eclipse projects on Karaf. To the later I've uploaded a few Eclipse-Apache Karaf project talks to Karaf's articles web page: From Eclipse Tycho to Apache Karaf: the easy way!, and RAP Application in Karaf with Felix and PAX-WEB The required RAP Apache Karaf archive described in the article can be found here. As to Raspberry Pi support there has been some discussion on the mailing lists from users booting Karaf, but there are some edge cases such as service wrappers that need to be ported to the platform.  

The following evening the OSGi Alliance held their own Bird of a Feather meeting to discuss everything from OSGi specifications, to opening the floor to hear about concerns from the user community and where OSGi technologies are going (such as Apache Celix - an OSGi implementation in C, and the beginning discussion of OSGi in Javascript). At the end of the meeting several OSGi books were given away including copies of OSGi in Action, Enterprise OSGi in Action, and Instant OSGi Starter.

On Thursday morning I had the pleasure of presenting my talk on my experiences from using Apache Karaf in the trenches. I've embedded a Prezi web copy of my talk below, however it lacks my verbal delivery of stories and context for the slides. The audiences' variety of excellent questions, active listening, and insightful comments really made the whole session feel far too short. After the talk I spent the better part of an hour answering follow up questions from attendees in the hallways outside the lecture rooms.