Update 17 Nov 07
- Added Newton Project
- Added Osxa Project
As InfoQ reported this summer, there is an increasing interest in OSGi and its related projects. I have created a table summarizing the status of OSGi in the field of Open Source community. Starting from available open source container, I searched about projects exploiting OSGi and their level of adoption of this technology
There are several levels for OSGi adoption. At the minimum level a project’s team can package its artifacts as OSGi bundles with the goal of deploying them across an OSGi compatible container. At the maximum level a project’s team can strategically adopt OSGi as the component architecture using programming model and services offered by the platform.
A project starting from scratch could exploit OSGi at its maximum level while an existing project could start adopting its features incrementally. In both cases benefits are evident: dependency tracking between components, version tracking, standard deployment format and many more. If your code is monolithic and bad modularized you have to fight against a lot of large refactoring before OSGi-enabling it.
OSGi standard is quite aged (first version was release on 1999) but it seems that only in the last months it is becoming a consolidated platform to build systems. As you can see from the following table several projects have adopted a whole OSGi architecture while many other successfully projects are starting experimenting and/or discussing about it.
I divided table in four categories:
- OSGi open source containers
- Projects exploiting an OSGi-based Architecture
- Projects supporting OSGi deployment
- Projects experimenting OSGi
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