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Spring OSGi support gaining momentum

Posted on September 7th, 2006 by Adrian Colyer in OSGi, Spring.

Adrian Colyer

It started out as a small thing. Just a hunch of mine that Spring and OSGi should sit together very well. The idea was that by enabling Spring applications to be deployed in an OSGi runtime, we could bring better modularity, versioning, runtime deployment and update capabilities to Spring applications. It's a project I never really advertised; I just started experimenting, talking to a few people, and writing some early prototype code.

It turns out that a *lot* of people seem to be interested in Spring and OSGi. We have a collaboration ongoing with representatives from BEA, Oracle, IBM, Eclipse, the OSGi Alliance, and several others to build a shared model of how Spring support for OSGi should look, and how we can make it easy to build enterprise applications on the OSGi runtime. The most recent version of the specification is attached to Spring JIRA issue 1802. Here's a direct link to the specification text. I ran a workshop in London a couple of weeks ago where we got several of the key players together and made some excellent progress. Peter Kriens (OSGi Technical Director) has a write-up here.

The OSGi Alliance itself is placing a big emphasis on the enterprise for the R5 release, and there's an initial workshop on the topic scheduled for Monday of next week (Sept. 11th). It looks like some of the Spring-OSGi work can be taken forward through the OSGi standardisation process, which is certainly something I'd be keen to see happen.
If you're interested in participating in the discussion, we have a Spring and OSGi google group that you can join. We'll have an early release of the software out that you can try as soon as possible, and the plan is to release a final version alongside or as part of Spring 2.1.

You didn't think the innovation was going to stop with Spring 2.0 did you? ;)

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6 responses

  1. Gunnar Wagenknecht says:

    Added on September 11th, 2006 at 12:38 am

    This is slightly off topic, so sorry about that.

    JIRA has a nice feature of watching issues so that you get mail notifications whenever somebody updates an issue, i.e. adds a comment. I subscribed your issue long time ago but never got any email whenever you changes something on the issue.

    I wanted to contact the admins about that but it looks like none of the admins want to receive mails. ;) http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/secure/Administrators.jspa is just a list of names with no contact emails.

    Any ideas why that feature is turned off in your JIRA tracker?

  2. Adrian Colyer (blog author) says:

    Added on September 11th, 2006 at 11:17 am

    It's been bugging me for a long time that notifications weren't working (it's even worse not to be notified when you're actually responsible for the issue!). I raised the issue a couple of times but never got anywhere. However… whether it was your doing or some strange coincidence, notifications started flowing for the first time ever overnight last night. Hopefully they are now working for you too.

  3. Ashok Shetty says:

    Added on May 23rd, 2007 at 8:14 am

    Hi Adrian: Do you have any idea on why was Jini support really dropped from R4? Jini has usage in the travel and banking verticals (not very well advertised, I know).

  4. Adrian Colyer (blog author) says:

    Added on May 25th, 2007 at 7:57 am

    Ashok, I don't have any personal insight but I asked Peter Kriens and he pointed me to two blog entries that he has posted on this topic:

    * http://www.aqute.biz/Blog/2007-04-05
    * http://www.osgi.org/blog/2005/11/why-did-we-let-jini-out-of-osgi-r4.html

    Hope this helps…
    – Adrian.

  5. labi says:

    Added on July 3rd, 2007 at 8:24 am

    In my opinion this is the best combination of technologies, I have ever imagined in the java-world. I am super excited, I have been dreaming of this project since I saw the news in spring. I cannot wait to take this baby for a ride, I am yet to come up with some serious project for this framework (spring-osgi) but honestly, I don't think such a pair of technology can be rivaled (within their niche) anytime soon. Spring and OSGI is defintely the future for java-fins like myself. Please keep it going. Let it rip. Projects like this makes me proud of the java community, I can't help it. This is good stuff.

  6. Chris Beams says:

    Added on September 19th, 2007 at 1:31 pm

    For more on this, check out the recently posted interview Adrian did with InfoQ on Spring OSGi: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/osgi-adrian-colyer

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