Rickerism

I was involved in the creation of an OSGi solution for the US Army for the Super Bowl XL security. It was an early implementation of SODA. It connected all the various nuclear, biological and chemical sensors that the US Army National Guard and US Department of Energy were using to detect hazardous materials. The location of each device and its reading was shared on the network. The location and status was plotted on a satellite image of downtown Detroit. The soldiers walking the beat saw the same information as the guys in the command shack.

Two events happened during that mission that highlighted the strength of OSGi.

The first happened the day before the Super Bowl. We had been testing for weeks, but on Saturday afternoon the committee tells us that we will not be allowed to use 802.11b or 802.11g bands for fear of interfering with their wireless ticketing devices. We scrambled to make the change. With the component structure of OSGi, it was very easy to change the software. The hard part was finding 802.11a routers in Detroit on a Saturday evening. We cleaned out every Best Buy in three counties.

The second event occurred the morning of the Super Bowl. We were in the tents around the stadium bringing the gear on line. One of the soldiers walked up and showed the palm top computer screen he was holding. “Why is it doing this?” he asked. He had found a bug.

“Shoot. I know what’s causing that,” exclaimed one of the senior developers. He went over to a laptop in the tent, pulled up the source code in Eclipse, made a few changes to the code and built a new version of the bundle. He then pulled up the system monitor and deployed the bundle out to all of the installations. The whole process took less than five minutes. In fact, the soldier was still standing there going through the screens. He muttered, “Oh, it’s working now,” and went on about his mission. Indeed it was working, and working on all of the other computers scattered across downtown Detroit.

When people ask me if OSGi is ready for enterprise applications, I immediately think back to that mission at Super Bowl XL. That was nearly two years ago.