Go! OSGi Go!

You can never have too much good news, especially when it’s about a technology you believe in. That’s how I feel about OSGi. This time I was pleased to read the interview with Jerome Dochez, What’s GlassFish Doing With OSGi?.

At least two important points come out of it.

• A key component developed by Sun officially supports OSGi. That’s a good sign given the rivalry between two module technologies (JSR 277 — Java Module System and JSR 294 — OSGi) and their standardization within Java.
• Another application server is adopting or directly supporting OSGi.

And now… OSGi too! What’s the background?

We wanted to have OSGi support, because it’s clearly the leading solution for modules, and it is important for GlassFish to be able to consume OSGi services directly. We also offer the OSGi services and APIs to modules and applications running in v3 so that applications do not have to necessarily constrain themselves to the traditional Java EE modules (WAR, EAR, etc..) but can leverage OSGi as a programming model too.

What about JSR-277?

JSR 277 is becoming more friendly to OSGi as well. My role as an influencer would be to continue pushing the best integration possible between the technologies. I really believe that a good module subsystem should be implemented at the JVM level. I understand that OSGi has to work within the boundaries of the JDK features that had it has access to, but I think there is plenty of opportunity to bring the communities together and provide users with a solid compatible set of features that will preserve their investments

Keep it up. Go! OSGi Go!