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OSGi Progress

Posted by: Kirk Knoernschild on 11/12/2008

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Since I joined Burton Group, I’ve spent most of my time over on the APS Blog. I hope to spend a bit more time here going forward. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

InfoQ recently posted a great snippet on the progress of OSGi in the Enterprise. The article mentions SpringSource, who is clearly paving the trail for OSGi in the Enterprise. While other app server vendors are using OSGi to modularize their platforms, they aren’t exposing the capabilities of OSGi to developers. Eventually, they’ll have to, but for now, they are not. That’s too bad.

If you take a step back and look at what SpringSource has done the last six months, it’s significant. First came Spring Dynamic Modules, which I showed in a previous blog entry. Then SpringSource Application Platform. Then SpringSource dm Server. And now the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository. Of all, it’s the bundle repository that may be most important. While it’s been possible for a while to develop OSGi bundles, the dearth of OSGi tools and third party frameworks packaged as OSGi bundles has been a barrier to entry for enterprise developers. The bundle repository made available by SpringSource has removed that barrier.

While the InfoQ article offered a great synopsis of OSGi in the Enterprise, comparing OSGi to Maven is like comparing a Porsche to a Volkswagon. In other words, there is no comparison. OSGi wins hands down, and while offering the comparison might help explain modularization to those familiar with Maven but not with OSGi, it confuses and dilutes OSGi.

InfoQ does sum it up well, though. "…building dynamic, modular applications is where the industry is headed." That’s spot on. And as OSGi continues to penetrate the market, it means great things for the Java platform.


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Kirk Knoernschild's complete blog can be found at: http://techdistrict.kirkk.com

About Kirk Knoernschild

Kirk is an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, he has worked in the trenches on real software projects. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development.

In 2002, Kirk wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. He has also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. Kirk is the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. Kirk has trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. He enjoys hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP.

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