Friday, May 7, 2010

Recent News about Mobile OSGi

It’s been a while since I wrote about Mobile OSGi (mainly because I was working on Mobile OSGi), so I hope I haven’t lost any followers. Thank YOU for bearing with me!

In this post I want to put forward a few recent news about Mobile OSGi.

Free Off-the-shelf Mobile OSGi Runtimes and Tools

If you’re a developer and interested in getting your hands on Mobile OSGi, take a look at the free offerings from ProSyst. In the last month my team and I have worked hard to create this product portfolio and we’re proud on what we have achieved. What you can download:
- Mobile OSGi for Android
- Mobile OSGi for Windows Mobile
- Mobile OSGi for Nokia S60
- Mobile OSGi SDK (Eclipse based)
Apart from the plain OSGi layer, these stacks come with a host of added value services (e.g. Support for W3C Mobile Web Widgets; Remote Management; Tooling Support; etc.). Every package comes with documentation (find box on the right) so it’s easy to get into it. The Win Mobile and Nokia S60 stacks contain an embedded CDC Java VM, so installation is really as easy as it can get. If you have questions or face issues, use this forum to get feedback.

We also put the stack on external download sites. These are:
- Android Market (for the Android version)
- Handango.com (for the Windows Mobile version)

I am pretty amazed by the number of downloads we get on the Android Market (1500+ in a few weeks only). Who are all these OSGi enthusiasts out there? Please get back to me!!

OSGi on Android

The uptake of Android is accelerating and so I am getting asked frequently how OSGi and Android compare and what’s the value of putting OSGi onto Android. Here’s a slide deck on this matter:

Feedback very welcome, as always!

VisionMobile Mobile Mega Trends 2010: OSGi considered value add for OEMs and MNOs

Andreas Constantinou from VisionMobile once again has done an impressive job in analyzing and describing mega trends of the mobile industry. His annual Mega Trend decks are must-reads for all mobilists – a beautiful piece of visionary thinking.

Starting from page 47 Andreas analysis monetization opportunities for OEMs and MNOs. He distinguishes 10 value areas (Services; Service delivery; Service distribution; Device design; UI design; Core apps; Operating system; HW Platform; Chipset IP and Manufacturing) and identifies those ones where OEMs and MNOs used to or will capture value from –services playing a significant role.

OSGi is considered a value enabler for “Service delivery”, a key instrument for MNOs to implement their smart pipe strategies (which centers around capturing value from services rather than plans only) and for OEMS to leverage their unique position in service distribution.

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t agree more …. ;-) OSGi is the only sophisticated, standardized, embedded and cross-platform service delivery framework on the market.

Mobile OSGi Mass Market Device(s)

Well, those of you following this blog will already know that Sprint has stopped the Sprint Titan project which had OSGi at its core. David Beers has commented on Sprint's move in his post Drove my Chevy to the levee... and Has Sprint caved to Google on its open Java platform?. Really not much to add to this.
Anyway, I do not want to put my fingers into the wound of those that were involved. I just want to mention that 5 mass market devices were developed incl. OSGi, 2 Win Mobile, 2 Android, 1 Brew. The latter is the Samsung Instinct HD device, still on the market. More about its Java capabilities you find in a post of Darryl Mocek. Sad they didn’t continue…

That’s all for now. Please share your feedback!
- Jo

5 comments:

Vedran said...

Hi,
a technical question. I am trying to develop an application (a very simple one) based on ProSyst's mBS for Android, within the ADT equipped Eclipse IDE. However, when I try to install the jar deployed on the emulated SD card (via the "OSGi Management" app on the Android 1.5 emulator), a weird message is displayed saying "Install failed, the bundle OSGi_on_Android_2 cannot be installed because requires Execution Environment(s) [OSGi/Minimum-1.1], which is/are not available in the framework Execution Environment(s) [OSGi/Minimum-1.0, OSGi/Minimum-1.1, CDC-1.0/Foundation-1.0, CDC-1.1/Foundation-1.1, J2SE-1.2, J2SE-1.3, J2SE-1.4, J2SE-1.5]!"

Is it me or is it confusing to see that execution environment OSGi/Minimum-1.1 is not supported, yet the same one is then listed as one of the framework execution environments? :o

Any help would be kindly appreciated.

Jo Ritter said...

Hi Vedran, great to hear you're using OSGi for Android. Thanks for your feedback. I'll the experts respond to your questions. However, could you please do me a favour and post your question to this forum:

http://dz.prosyst.com/forum/YaBB.pl?board=mobileandroid

You'll get a response right away.

Thanks,
Jo

David Beers said...

I guess I've been out of touch, because I didn't see this good news until today. Huge thanks to ProSyst for making these great mobile OSGI stacks available as free downloads to the developer community. Sprint's short-sightedness is sad and rather stupid, but this release is like handing us the key to unlock these devices so developers aren't so dependent on carriers or OEMs for the APIs and services available on-device. Well done!

By the way, ProSyst's work on the Smart Home SDK seems like a good way to make the Mobile SDK more and more attractive as well. Looking forward to using these stacks, and wishing you the best in educating the carriers about the enormous possibilities. These SDKs deserve high visibility!

The Mobile Worker said...

Nice news! Thanks for sharing!

Unknown said...

Hi,
It's a long time since anything has been posted here, is this still live?
The entries in the link for download all seem to be smart home and telematics rather than mobile, which would I need to develop for Android and Windows Phone 8?
Sorry I'm probably being a bit dim.
Regards