About this Book
The OSGi specifications are well written and elaborate, so if you need to know details about OSGi technology, the specifications are the place to look. If you do, you’ll discover that they were written for someone who is going to implement the specifications, not use them. This book started out as an attempt to remedy this situation by creating a user-oriented companion guide for the specifications. Our goal wasn’t to create an OSGi cookbook but to thoroughly describe the important aspects of OSGi and show how to use them. Our main idea was to more simply explain the OSGi specifications by ignoring the implementation details and including additional usage information.
To that end, we’ve tried to limit ourselves to discussing the most common concepts, features, and mechanisms needed to work with OSGi technology throughout the book. That doesn’t mean we were able to avoid all the esoteric details. As you’ll find when you begin working with OSGi, it enforces a new level of strictness when it comes to modularity, which will likely break some of your old practices. In the end, you need to understand what’s going on under the covers in some places to be able to effectively debug and diagnose the situations in which you find yourself.
As our writing progressed, the book chapters began to separate naturally into three parts:
- Explaining the core OSGi specification
- Describing how to work with the specification in practice
- Introducing advanced OSGi-related topics