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Peter Kriens

About two years ago I got a request from a guy called BlueDavy. He wanted to know if he could translate the bnd manual page into Chinese? He explained to me that there were lots of people using bnd in China and they really lacked some documentation. I was more than happy to give him a web page that he could use to provide the Chinese version. The result looked very strange to me. All these incomprehensible characters interspersed with well known words, like friends you serendipitously meet in a far away city. And now there is also an OSGi book in Chinese.

When we started working on the OSGi specifications in 1998 we did not foresee that one day there would be a Chinese book about our efforts. And now there is a Chinese book even before there is an English book! A number of English books are in the making, but BlueDavy has beaten them to the punch. And this is good. China is clearly emerging as an economic powerhouse and there must be many programmers that can benefit from OSGi. OSGi is the de-facto standard for modularity. Look at the major Java Application servers, they are all running on top of OSGi. These application servers are very large applications themselves, so large that modularity is not an option, it is mandatory. More and more applications are moving in the realm where modularity is a requirement to survive. This is caused by the success of open source projects that make it easy to build systems based on large swaths of functionality, as well of the natural progression, where over time, things always grow.

OSGi is a quest for reusable components, a dream of our industry since the dawn of computing. As one of the authors of the specifications, I am the first to admit we haven't found the grail yet. However, I am convinced that OSGi is further on this path than any other standard or product. We do need help in this quest. With the OSGi specifications you get the fruits of an effort that has costed tens of millions of dollars to produce, in return we are asking for your feedback, support, participation in the Chinese user group, or best, becoming an OSGi member. Having a single modularity system is crucial to move Java to the next level, and for that we need you.

BlueDavy has done a tremendous job of making the OSGi Core specifications clear in Chinese. And though I see many of my friends in the text, unfortunately, the rest is Chinese to me. It looks like this book is a thing of beauty that I cannot see.

Peter Kriens, Beaulieu, July 2009