Pax Tools on dzone.com

Craig Walls once more gives Pax Tools a great review:http://java.dzone.com/articles/dozen-osgi-myths-and

There's also a huge set of OSGi tools available from the OPS4J Pax project. I've already reviewed these tools on this blog, so I won't go into it again here. Suffice it to say that many of the Pax tools have become indispensable in my OSGi development toolbox. I'm particularly fond of Pax Construct, Pax Runner, Pax Exam, and Pax URL. You can count on me blogging more about the Pax tools soon.

Of the three testing frameworks listed, I tend to favor Pax Exam because it's currently the only one that is based on JUnit 4. Pax Drone is effectively deprecated in favor of Pax Exam, so unless you encounter a project that's already using it, you should disregard it. As for Spring-DM's testing support, it is nice in that it uses Spring autowiring to autowire OSGi services into a test class. But until it's based on JUnit 4, I still prefer Pax Exam.

Related: Pax Runner 0.18.0 Released

Craig Walls blogged about Pax Runner latest release:

I'm quite excited to see two fairly significant OSGi-related projects released today: Spring-DM 1.2.0 and Pax Runner 0.18.0.

Read more...

My blog about the upcoming Pax Runner:

Pax Runner 0.18.0 is about to be released this days and I think it has some new cool features that worth mentioning such as:

• Externalized profiles
• Composite provisioning
• Automatic transformation of standard jars into OSGi bundles
• Use the latest and greatest frameworks version
• Support updating provisioned bundles from original urls

Read more...

Related: ServiceMix 4 as a Web Application Server

Charles Moulliard blogged about using Pax in ServiceMix 4:

This week, I have discovered the web possibilities offered by the ServiceMix 4 platform. SMX ("pour les intimes") uses as its core platform the excellent packages of the project PAX which is the umbrella project for all OSGi bundles and tools.

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About OPS4J and Pax

OPS4J stands for Open Participation Software for Java, and this community is trying to build a new, more open model for Open Source development, where not only the usage is Open and Free, but the Participation is Open as well. Removal of barriers, let more people in, have more fun and less politics. I have also seen Open Development as a term to describe this.

Think of it as Wiki brought to Coding. Wikipedia is of course the most outstanding example of open collaboration.

Pax is the umbrella project for all OSGi bundles and tools.

OSGi is a runtime platform that allows for a much higher degree of dynamicity than any other container architecture and is well suited for both client and server applications. Eclipse is the most visible OSGi eco-system on the market, housing many UI driven OSGi projects including a runtime framework. Knopflerfish.org as well as Apache Felix are other runtime platforms, with their respective standard services.

PAX intend to be complimentary to all these efforts and main focus are on good practices and technology integration. Feel free to start or suggest additional sub-projects.

Later posts will introduce the single pax projects, developers & users as well as future directions of the project.