OSGi adoption on the rise!

InfoQ reports that OSGi adoption in the EE marketplace is rising and major vendors are now putting their weight in! Will this end the debate around the OSGi adoption as a Java standard (JSR 291) and the rival Java Module System specification (JSR 277)?

The story behind OSGi is a little awkward because, although to most architects and developers in the J2SE / J2EE world this is a brand new technology, OSGi has been around since 1999. Since the OSGi Alliance was founded the specification matured and was successfully implemented but, for a long while, mainly in embedded applications that had to deal with minimal system resources. This origin can still be seen in the specification and especially the compendium that specifies standard packages and services for device management, io and gsm.

Over the past few years OSGi gradually got more attention and off course the open source communities where among the first the jump on the bandwagon. This resulted in several great implementations like Equinox (the Eclipse runtime), Knopflerfish OSGi, Apache Felix (formely known as Oscar) and adoption in middleware such as JOnAS the application server from OW2 and, last but not least our favorite toolkit, Spring Framework with their Spring Dynamic modules for OSGi project which aims to OSGify their entire package.

Now finally we see that the major vendors like SAP, BEA, Red Hat and many more seem to realize they can no longer ignore OSGi and recognize its full potential. While the heated debate in the JCP is still going on, and will be going on for some time around the Java EE 6 specification (JSR 316), I think this kind of support may eventually prove to be decisive. It seems that when specification by consensus fails, guerrilla tactics work 8)

Bram