Software Engineering Radio - talking about OSGi, Rest, Opensource, ...

In the last four weeks a lot of people asked me about this "show" I am listening to on my way to work. It is called Software Engineering Radio and talks about trends and technologies in Software Engineering (OSGi, Rest, Opensource, ...). I was told that one of the next issues will be an interview with Peter Kriens on the current state of affairs with respect to OSGi.

Check it out. 

2008 OSGi Community Event - talking about trains

Two weeks ago I attended the OSGi Community Event in Berlin.

One of the presentations was from Deutsche Bahn about their new Mobile Integration Platform (MIP). It was not only in this presentation that I felt that OSGi has become the ICE of deployment platforms. A 300 km/h high-speed trend/train with a lot of momentum. Think about it: Do you want to be on the train or in front of it.

There were lots of good and interesting presentations. Here are a couple of highlights ...

• Deutsche Bahn: Mobile Integration Platform - using OSGi to bridge the gap between the lifecyle of a vehicle (e.g. train) and software (e.g. an application). Vehicles have a much longer lifecycle than software. A huge challenge with a lot of opportunity, but only the tip of the iceberg. After you have tapped into the vehicle and can really access it (anytime, anywhere) I would predict a new dimension of integration challenges that will arise on the backend side to make all the relevant information available to the train and also to process the information that comes from the train. Interesting. Very interesting.
• Deutsche Telekom/T-Labs: "We catalyze technology-based innovations" - very good presentation on the role of OSGi as an enabler for innovation. As previously discussed, currently (Mobile) Telekom Operators look for ways to maintain or even increase their relevance in the value-chain. If they do nothing they might turn into (more or less) value-less bit-pipes. OSGi is the kind/type of technology that will allow them to innovate faster and to roll-out these innovations to the customers, much faster than previously possible.
• Sprint: Titan - the next generation mobile service platform ("Browser with AJAX is JUST NOT ENOUGH"). Earlier this year Sprint released its new mobile software development platform called Titan.  This platform is a show-case, how Java technologies can come together to create a portable mobile software engineering platform that can bring applications to a wide variety of devices. OSGi is clearly a key enabler to make this happen.

BTW, this does not mean that the presentations I am not mentioning were not interesting. It means that I had to step out of the room for a meeting or a call and missed that specific presentation :).

Last but not least, we (IONA :)) showed a demo of the current status of the Distributed OSGi Reference Implementation. Overall a very energizing, educational, interesting event. I recommend you put it into your calendar for next year :).

RESTful Services - Dana Gardner, Adrian Trenaman, Roland Tritsch

Everybody is talking about REST. We do too :).

Join us on July, 15th for this existing Webinar on REST and RESTful Services. Will include a live demo of a RESTful iPhone integration.

CU there.

Innovation on Innovation - How to make elephants dance

Yesterday I went out and had a pint with Sailesh Panchal. He is an Enterprise Architect with the payments division of Lloyds TSB in London. Part of his responsibility is to foster innovation in Lloyds.

Obviously innovation needs to be directed towards a measurable goal/target/impact for the customer and/or the company. To judge, if an/the idea was just a good idea or a real innovation, you must be able to show some measurable ROI in a defined timeframe. Depending on the "size" of the innovation and the size of the organizations these timeframes can be easily 6 month or more. That's a long way down the road.

Question is: What kind of signposts can you create to judge ideas earlier?

We are looking for innovative ideas to foster, measure and rank (by value and relevance) innovative ideas in large enterprises. Sailesh is currently contemplating about implementing a system/culture, where the value of ideas gets rated by the number of citations that are made, means if you and your idea gets cited a lot the likelyhood that it is a good idea is high(er).

Just wondering ... communities.iona.com is implemented with Jive. We have a ranking for the number of posts a given individual creates. But there are markups that you can use to reference other docs and threads. Just wondering, if it would be possible to have a ranking for the docs and threads that get referenced the most?

Just wondering ...