I don’t know why, but sometimes great technology comes to early. And it must wait for its time. I think the same is with OSGi. Now we have forth edition. The first edition was released in May 2000. The situation was change after Eclipse foundation chooses OSGi specification in eclipse 3.2 as plugin system. Now it’s main core eclipse library. This specification has three implementation
* Eclipse Equinox
* Apache Feli
* Knopflerfish
I think you can start here Getting started with OSGi. You can find also how to integrate maven with OSGi in Jacek Laskowski wiki (in polish).
I’ll have many fun with Equinox implementation which I will describe in my wiki. Yep I’ve got a wiki system, and this is reason why i don’t post in last time. But i promise to post more.
In simple word OSGi specification is describing portion independent part of software as a bundle. You can imagine that bundle is simple module of Java program (jar, plugin). It must be fully self-describing. If you have ever tried building plugin system, that you know, that java class loader is a problem. OSGi has something called activator. Activator is responsible for starting and stopping bundles. OSGi is highly dynamic that means that bundles may come and go at any time in application life cycle.
In next episode : The tutorial to build OSGi bundles with maven-bundle-plugin. And I also try to compare OSGi implementation