Initial chapter 708 introduction
<section>
<title>Introduction</title>
- <para>The introduction...</para>
+ <para>
+ OSGi has become a platform capable of running large applications for a variety of purposes,
+ including rich client applications, server-side systems and cloud and container based architectures.
+ As these applications are generally based on many bundles, describing each bundle individually
+ in the application definition becomes unwieldy once the number of bundles reaches a certain level.
+
+ When developing large scale applications it is often the case that few people know the role of every
+ bundle or configuration item in the application. To keep the architecture understandable a grouping
+ mechanism is needed that allows for the representation of parts of the application into larger
+ entities that keep reasoning about the application manageable. In such a domain members of teams
+ spread across the organization will need to be able to both develop new parts for the application
+ as well as make tweaks or enhancements to their respective parts such as adding configuration and
+ resources or changing one or more bundles relevant to their part of the application.
+
+ The higher level constructs that define the application should be reusable in different contexts,
+ for example if one team has developed a component to handle job processing, different applications
+ should be able to use it, and if needed tune its configuration or other aspects so that it works in
+ each setting without having to know each and every detail that the job processing component is built
+ up from.
+
+ Applications often carry additional definitions, for example configurations or custom artifacts.
+ Architects often require that the various components be encapsulated in a single definition.
+
+ Systems are often composed by reusing existing building blocks, combining various applications
+ or subsystems together to create a larger system, where all these building blocks work together.
+ The architect of these systems need to think about components without having to dive into the
+ individual implementation details of each subcomponent.
+
+ This specification defines OSGi Features which can be used to model such applications. Features
+ contain the definition of an application or component and can be composed into larger systems.
+
+
+ </para>
</section>
