History

The oxygen project was originally established to produce an implementation of the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) platform capable of running on the Java 2 Micro Edition Connected Limited Device Configuration (J2ME CLDC). This required some changes to the OSGi platform (interfaces used) for compatibility. The aim of this portability is to allow J2ME clients to run OSGi bundles without having to recompile/redesign bundles. The CLDC Java runtime does not support dynamic class loading and these features of OSGi were not intended to be made available.

Since these early days of this effort the authors have identified a niche for a very lightweight OSGi-like service discovery framework. Within the Oxygen project we intend to make available an open source framework for dynamic service discovery that is:

• Lightweight - Smaller footprint and memory allocation compared to the bloated OSGi implementations. Back to the thin-client roots of OSGi.
• Simple - Eradicating the complex and error prone areas of the OSGi model (i.e. Manifest files and service/package dependency resolution)
• OSGi Compatible (if possible) - Services written for Oxygen should be able (with the help of tools and libraries) to be simply converted to work in existing OSGi frameworks.