Advancing OSGi tools, enterprise features and real world experience

I recently stumbled upon Craig Wall's (of "Spring in Action" and, lately, "Modular Java" fame) blog. I highly recommend his recipes for OSGi related stuff, particularly:

Integration testing of OSGi bundles with PAX Exam and Spring-DM support.

Testing is important, so both options are welcomed. Nonetheless, I find PAX Exam more flexible and powerful. I prepared a feature matrix for you:

Feature		PAX Exam	Spring DM
Provisioning	Maven	Yes	Yes
	HTTP	Yes	No
	File	Yes	No
Test Service Injection		No	Yes
Different Runtime Support	Different Types	Yes	Yes
	Different Versions	Yes	No
Multiple Runtimes/same test		Yes	No
Profiles Support		Yes	No
Junit 3		No	Yes
Juni 4		Yes	No
TestNG		Yes	No

One great feature of PAX Exam is that of running the same test against a bunch of different OSGi runtimes. If you are a OSGi component developer, you probably want to be sure your bundles run on every possible platform.

Two in a row: PAX Runner profiles and Distributed OSGi.

You don´t have to wait for the final release of R4.2 to be ready, neither your favorite OSGi distribution to implement it in order to use some nice Enterprise OSGi features.

Living in a service oriented world, I´m interested in Distributed OSGi and the reference implementation is already here from Apache CFX. With PAX Runner profiles it´s easier than ever to test drive this Enterprise OSGi goodie. Before this, I had to rely on traditional spring remoting support.

More to come

My current team developed an OSGi based transactional platform (I'll give a talk about it at SG'09), my favorite IDE is OSGi based and I have an OSGi enabled phone (more about this on a later post). The question is: Do OSGi really pays off ?

Well, I know it can. But when introducing yourself to the world of OSGi based apps, it´s not absolutely clear how to avoid getting into more trouble than you probably deserve.

Today you can get 1 published book in german, 3 in english and there are at least two more on the way (early access program), but there´s no much real world experience published on developing large scale OSGi based enterprise applications. We need to fix this ;-)

This year I won´t make it into the 3rd Workshop on Assessment of Contemporary Modularization Techniques. Nevertheless keep an eye on it. I'm sure great insight will come.