I've been enjoying one week in Amsterdam at Intertraffic and the Cooperative Mobility Showcase. There the CVIS project has been on display, demonstrating a wide range of ITS services.
The Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) Project is one of Europe’s flagship projects for cooperative mobility, providing a universal platform for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication and services. This universal platform includes no less than Knopflerfish OSGi!
The CVIS architecture includes the concept of the "ITS App Store" with the full range of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure applications. This is all implemented in OSGi, which is ideally suited for such an environment where applications (bundles) are downloaded and executed on a vehicle device.
This week was really a stress test for Knopflerfish. There was more than 20 applications running at the same time, almost 150 bundles, all with the possibility to run in the background, exchanging data with vehicles as they passed by.
So where there no problems? Of course there were and after this show you realize why Apple has such a strict certification policy for apps in their app store. Knopflerfish is not flawless, but the vast majority of the problems was actually related to badly written apps (bundles). Once they were corrected the whole system performed were nicely.
Also as a comparison with the iPhone. They allow ONE app at a time, NO background processing. We had 25 apps, almost ALL doing background processing, receiving and sending data asynchronously.
Final word - be thread safe ;-)
/Christer - directly from Schiphol
