Where the (OSGi) world is going after Devcon Europe?

The latest OSGi Devon Europe (Zurich, June 22th) has been quite a peculiar conference. Very small, compared to Jazoon, Devoxx or even some italian JavaDays; very technical, with solid contents and just a few marketing presentations; and literally packed with news, presentations of new projects and specifications. In a sense, it was a good representation of the OSGi movement in Europe: small, focused, and tremendously innovative. But maybe lacking some of the fundamental "soft skills" (ability to market ideas and to present innovation to non-geeks in a interesting way) that can make the difference from an excellent technology and a successful one.

In any case, here's a list of the most interesting developments in the OSGi world:

• R4.2 is coming, and with it the Remote Services specification (Eclipse ECF and Apache CXF are the first implementations). With Remote Services OSGi won't be considered (finally) just "SOA in a JVM" anymore, but a real distributed technology; another step toward the real Pervasive OSGi.
• The Blueprint Service specification will standardize the dependency injection mechanism proposed by Spring DM
• The "Enterprise Edition" of OSGi will come next year, bringing more interoperability between Java EE components and OSGi
• The "Provisioning war" has officially started with the presentation of Apache Ace and Eclipse P2
• Mobile OSGi is coming, and more and more companies are working on that; Sprint Titan, Prosyst and Luminis are paving the way, but something is moving also in the open source arena

On a personal note, OSGi Devcon has also represented a turning point, since it was the first event I could hand out business cards of my OSGi consultancy, and my first OSGi conference after being elected Apache Felix committer.

So, a lot of things going on!