AJAX, OSGi Hot Topics At EclipseCon

AJAX and OSGi were two central topics of conversations at this week's EclipseCon, drawing high attendance at sessions devoted to the technologies and sparking much chatter among attendees.

OSGi is emerging from the shadows as more companies adopt its Java service platform as a foundation for their own software. Its overseer, the OSGi Alliance, was formed in 1999 by Sun, IBM and others. But, while OSGi technology is used by a broad array of enterprise software vendors, awareness of it remains low. OSGi's arcane, technical focus has hindered adoption, as well.

"When you look at the Web site, it's really a mess. It doesn't tell you what it does. You could get a white paper. I didn't want a white paper, I wanted to know what it did," said Jason Sankey, a founding software developer with Zutubi, based in Sydney, Australia.

Prompted by a recommendation from a customer, Zutubi is adopting OSGi as the basis of the new plug-in framework for its continuous integration server, Pulse. Despite the learning curve, Sankey is pleased with OSGi; he came to EclipseCon, held this week in Santa Clara, Calif., in part to learn more about the technology.

"OSGi has really gained steam in the past few years, especially with Eclipse Equinox," he said.

The OSGi framework underpins the Eclipse platform's runtime, Equinox. Because the two frameworks are so intertwined, OSGi co-hosted its developer conference with EclipseCon this year for the first time. The move pleased attendees; Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich reported seeing packed sessions at most of the OSGi track events.

"We're very interested in this Enterprise Expert Group at OSGi. We hope some of the technology from that comes through to Eclipse projects," Milinkovich said in an interview.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language) was another hot topic at the conference. The Eclipse Foundation spotlighted its AJAX projects, and a session on "What Does Eclipse Need To Do To Become the IDE for Ajax?" was among the conference's most popular.

AJAX, a bundle of technologies and techniques used for building Web application interfaces with the smooth look-and-feel and responsiveness of desktop applications, is a technology soaring in popularity. It's also a challenge for developers; AJAX projects are famed for their complexity. During the EclipseCon session, Nexaweb CTO Coach Wei told his horror story of spending three days debugging an AJAX application he'd written: After combing through every line of JavaScript, he found that the problem originated in a CSS file. The interdependencies involved in building AJAX applications can make their development a nightmare.

Next: AJAX toolsets to the rescue, but how many are too many?