Tutorials for OSGi, Declarative Services and the MUSIC Context System

As a research associate at the University of Cyprus, I work for the MUSIC-IST (somehow, the anagram for "Self-Adapting Applications for Mobile Users in Ubiquitous Computing Environments"), which is an FP7 IP project funded by the European Union. It aims at enabling the development of context-aware, self adaptive applications. One of the most important novelties of MUSIC, is that it provides a comprehensive development methodology. This means that the developers have a plethora of guidance, tools and libraries available when they depart developing such an application. Furthermore, as it is based on a Middleware architecture, MUSIC provides flexibility and facilitates code reuse.

As part of my research, I am the principal architect and developer of the MUSIC Context System. In the following posts, I will describe how this system can be used to build context-aware applications. As this system builds on top of OSGi, and especially leverages the Declarative Services specification, the first tutorials cover the basics of OSGi, starting from installing and launching the framework. As new tutorials become available, I will update the list in this blog entry.

OSGi and Declarative Services

• Starting with OSGi - Tutorial 1 (published Dec 31st, 2008)
  
• Your first component - Tutorial 2 (published Jan 1st, 2009)
• Binding declarative services - Tutorial 3 (published Jan 2nd, 2009)
• Interacting with the CLI - Tutorial 4 (published Jan 3rd, 2009)
  
• Component lifecycle support - Tutorial 5 (published Jan 4th, 2009)

MUSIC Context System

• Introduction to the MUSIC Context System - Tutorial 6 (published Jan 7th, 2009)
• Context Model and Ontology - Tutorial 7 (published Jan 28th, 2009)
  
• Developing your first context sensor plug-in - Tutorial 8 (published Jan 29th, 2009)
• Developing a context client - Tutorial 9 (published Jan 30th, 2009)
• Developing a complete context-aware application (CaMP) - Tutorial 10 (published Feb 12th, 2009)
  

The only requirement for attending these tutorials is a reasonable command of Object-Oriented programming in Java.

For comments, or suggestions regarding these tutorials, please contact the author via email (you can find it in my homepage: http://member.acm.org/~nearchos).

Resources

1. OSGi website and and the Specifications of Release 4 (R4)
2. Neil Bartlett's blog entries on Getting Started with OSGi and the first chapters of his book (in draft)
3. A 6-page quick-start introduction to OSGi and Equinox (requires registration): Getting Started with Equinox and OSGi Refcard
4. Andre L. C. Tavares, Marco Tulio Valente, A Gentle Introduction to OSGi, SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Vol. 33, No. 5 (Aug. 2008), pp. 1-5
5. A few books by Amazon are unfortunately not available until Summer ("Equinox and OSGi" and "OSGi in Action: Creating Modular Applications in Java")