On Jun 26, 2009, at 11:18 AM, Sam Chance wrote:
That's a very emotional reply. :-) I don't share the same "IBM
domination"
view. One can kick and scream, but the fact remains that the
largess is
moving to or has already moved to OSGi. Sorry.
You can stay on your path but you will increasingly find yourself an
outlier. It's a high risk, high reward proposition. The customers I
support use IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, SpringSource, TIBCO, etc.
They also
use open source things like FUSE, Jetty, Tomcat, Apache _____, etc.
Most,
if not all, are going to OSGi or are already there.
Your assertion that "OSGi from the outside doesn't seem to be "adding"
anything... [you] need..." suggests you may not fully understand
it. I
could be wrong. OSGi is certainly not a competitor to Jini, but
rather an
exceptional complement. Further, your own "interests" suggest you
would
embrace OSGi and SCA.
Anyway, my aim is not to convince, but rather illuminate.
I appreciate your perspective Sam. I'll add some more of mine.
I provide products/services to my clients, and they use many of the
things that you list. My services utilize things like JDBC for oracle
access, I don't see OSGi visible in that API, but I guess one could
elect to use an OSGi package to "document" the parameters for access
to a database server, instead of something like a properties file, or
a jini Configuration. I've used Jetty (see http://
jetset.dev.java.net) to allow me to deploy a servlet into a
com.sun.jini.start configured set of services. There are lots of
different places that I've "configured", "packaged", "described" how
things work together, and that is, for me, more often than not, the
simple part of what I do. I try to use existing and appropriate
"standards" for these types of things so that I can "fit" my services
into a framework of configuration and manageability that is
appropriate for my customers. I don't see that OSGi adds enough
value, for me, to get excited about it. Primarily, it greatly changes
the "foundation" of what I will do, and how I will do it, in a way
that just seem like "change", not value.
Statements like the following (off the OSGi website), highlight, for
me, the fact that there is nothing "defining" and "exciting" about
what OSGi is doing.
Explaining OSGi technology to those unfamiliar with it is remarkably
difficult. There are numerous articles on the web that somewhat
indignantly tell you that there is no good explanation of OSGi
technology and that the article will solve that. Unfortunately, quite
often the articles still fail to explain it to absolute newcomers
because OSGi technology provides solutions to problems that many
people simply see as intrinsic aspects of software development in Java
and would not call them problems.
This, seems to say, we've been around, do something for so long, and
without really trying to solve a problem, that we have a lot of tools
for a lot of people to use, and if you can get some value out of all
this work that we've done, we think you like that.
Gregg Wonderly
