OSGi based Web application

I decide to develop OSGi based web application. Quick investigation bring me to Equinox Servlet Container. Because I didn't decide jet which OSGi implementation I'd like to use, I created my own servlet container. My servlet container is identical to Equinix implementation, but there are some changes and I think in the future there could be more.

Peter Kriens

Well, just as obviously, people's requirements differ. Equinox is optimized for very large systems, uses lots of caching, but is therefore much bigger than Knopflerfish or Apache Felix. The best part about OSGi technology is that it still strives to write applications once and run anywhere, and it is really getting closer. An independent specification allows different implementations that optimize for a certain area.

The next decision was using Maven to setup the servlet bridge for Tomcat. It has borrowed much more time, than I thought. But hear is the results of my pom.xml. So the maven could deploy my application at a servlet container (e. g. Tomcat, Jetty, ...)

The advantage of using OSGi is a strong modularity and your can use it at different solutions. First of all I would like to create Google Web Toolkit (GWT) bundle and use it with such JE frameworks as Spring and Hibernate. The last two already have the bridge on OSGi. Actually I don't know does the GWT have some bridge or can I just wrap it.

Adopting OSGi in Java Application Frameworks

Adopting OSGi in Java Application Frameworks: A Case Study — Migration of software systems to the OSGi platform is gaining momentum with wide acceptance of the OSGi technology as the dynamic module system for Java. This transition is of special interest when it comes to popular Java application frameworks, which attract a growing number of Java developers around the world. Although the technical merits of the OSGi platform are broadly recognized, the migration of existing application frameworks is slow due to significant redesign and re-implementation efforts involved. We present an alternative lightweight approach - an adaptation of existing Java application framework for component based OSGi environment. Adaptation, as opposed to migration, eliminates the necessity of modularizing or redesigning the existing framework. This is particularly important when existing software platform and the associated programming model is mature and has already penetrated into the market place. As a general adaptation solution we introduce a thin layer between the OSGi Service Platform and the existing framework. Furthermore, we present the case study of an OSGi adaptation of a popular open source Java platform developed by IBM Research for integration of software analytics. Our results demonstrate that the adaptation approach is not limited to the presented case, but is broadly applicable to a variety of Java application frameworks.

Why OSGi?

OSGi is being adopted in an increasing number of projects. The spec provides a common model for writing and deploying apps to local or remote computers in modularized form. Instead of creating monolithic app, the OSGi spec allows the collaboration of many small components. This pres shows you why a spec like OSGi is crucial, what it really encompasses, and what the future developments will be. OSGi: The Foundation