OSGi - A Component of the Next Generation Platform?

Blogger: Kirk Knoernschild

There are many forces that influence technological evolution. After a decade of building enterprise applications on the web, today’s enterprise application platform is slowly evolving to the next generation application platform. What exactly are the components of this next superplatform?  Without question, as the next generation platform slowly evolves, a significant aspect will be the programming models and frameworks that team members use to develop and deploy enterprise applications.

The OSGi Service Platform is a dynamic component system for Java. Succinctly described as “SOA in a JVM”, OSGi provides extended capabilities on the Java platform that include the ability to deploy multiple versions of a component, discover new components dynamically, and deploy components without restarting the system. Because component relationships are carefully managed by the OSGi runtime environment, the benefits of modularity yield the potential for dynamically adaptable software systems. After flourishing anonymously in the embedded systems and networked devices market for almost 10 years, OSGi was popularized by Eclipse upon the foundation's adoption of OSGi as its core plug-in technology in 2004. While still in its infancy within the enterprise, OSGi is poised to surface as the core component model of the next generation Java platform.

While Burton Group believes OSGi is an important technology standard worth adopting, what is your perspective? As part of upcoming Burton Group research, I’d like to ask that you take a few moments to complete a brief survey that will inform us on your point of view on OSGi adoption within the enterprise. I'll leave the survey open until May 30, 2008. I appreciate your help