Acknowledgments

Kirk Chen

Many people have generously contributed their time and ideas to this book, for which I am truly grateful.

Jan Luehe reviewed the book with characteristic thoroughness. His meticulous attention to detail and unwavering insistence on clarity and accuracy greatly improved the quality of this book. David Bowen provided careful and thoughtful review; he made me think harder and be precise on many important topics. They both managed to achieve this despite their hectic schedules of working on the Java Embedded Server product and contributing to OSGi specification development activities. Anselm Baird-Smith, Zhiqun Chen, and Alice Tull provided in-depth comments. I would also like to thank Liang Zhu for his helpful feedback. They prompted me to clarify confusions and flesh out underdeveloped concepts in the early drafts of the book. Paru Somashekar reviewed the device access chapter and gave me good comments.

I am very grateful to the external reviewers, whom I have never met, for their encouragement, constructive criticism, and valuable comments. Barry Busler, Joshua Engel, Mark Kuharich, Lou Mauget, Kevin Ruland, Mike Talley, Daryl Wilding-McBride, and an anonymous reviewer provided detailed feedback for the book. Being too close to the material can be a liability. Their fresh perspective took me back a step to rethink some of my assumptions and to address issues that matter to the reader. Chapters have been restructured and contents added as a result of their suggestions.

Jan Luehe, David Bowen, Zhiqun Chen, and Suzanne Ahmed pointed out errors in the manuscript or brought my attention to them. The discussions I had with Christian Kurzke on device access were very enlightening.

This book benefited from working with other members of the OSGi consortium. Tommy Bohlin, B. J. Hargrave, Peter Kriens, and Ben Reed have made significant contributions to the evolution of the specification to its current state. Sections 4.2, 6.4, and 9.5.1 cover or expand some of the solutions that they described in discussions.

I also want to thank Li Gong for giving me the opportunity to write this book. Tim Lindholm and Lisa Friendly provided me with helpful reviews; their advice also helped me navigate hurdles in the writing process. Julie DiNicola and Tyrrell Albaugh from Addison-Wesley patiently answered my questions; coordinated reviews, copyediting, and production; advised me on schedules; and undertook many other efforts for a complex book project.

Raj Mata provided me with marketing research materials. Keith Rodgers and Rob Patten both went over part of the book. My managers, Mark Fulks and Harry Burks, allowed me to take time off from a busy project schedule and gave me considerable latitude to work on the book, for which I'm very grateful.

I was privileged to have worked with Anselm Baird-Smith, Ross Dargahi, Pierre Delisle, Yaroslav Faybishenko, and Kevin Kluge on the first Java Embedded Server project, with Bob Mines as our manager. I am also blessed with the opportunity to work with David Bowen, David-John Burrowes, David Connelly, Ulrich Gall, Christian Kurzke, Jan Luehe, Alice Tull—who either worked on the OSGi specifications at one time or are still working on them—and many others comprising the extremely talented and dedicated Java Embedded Server team throughout its history. I owe my professional growth to what I have learned from my colleagues at Sun Microsystems.

ServiceSpace and its programming model are the brain child of Anselm Baird-Smith while he was at Sun Microsystems. He created the first working prototype, which became the basis for the Java Embedded Server product. The concept of bundles and their life cycles, services and the importance of their interface and implementation separation, the essential common hosting framework and service registry, the challenges and benefits of a component-based model, the crucial implementation detail of using class loaders to achieve insulation among bundles, the view of leveraging the underlying Java platform as much as possible (using JAR files for bundles and Java™ 2 Platform security), the design of HTTP service as the control point and user interface to the gateway through the use of servlets, and the relevance of such an application model to intelligent devices were but some of the ideas put forth by him and remain at the core of this software architecture today. It is only fitting for me to dedicate this book to him.

Finally, I am grateful to Michael Fleming, my undergraduate English professor, for having shown me that writing in the English language can be as rewarding as writing in programming languages.

Li Gong

I am grateful to past and current members of the Java Embedded Server team, without whom there would not be a Java Embedded Server product. I also appreciate the collaborative spirit and the technical insights offered by members of OSGi's Java Expert Group. It was my privilege to chair this group until the completion of the Open Service Gateway 1.0 specification. I am indebted to Kirk Chen, my coauthor who did most of the work when my new duties called me far away. I'd like to thank Dick Neiss, my manager during my tenure as head of the Server Products Group at the Consumer and Embedded Division, for his encouragement and support. Finally, I'd like to express my gratitude to Lisa Friendly and Tim Lindholm, editors of the Java series at Sun Microsystems, and Julie DiNicola and Mike Hendrickson from Addison-Wesley for making this book possible. Working with them has been a real pleasure.