OSGi has been mentioned quite a bit in the industry lately, with Equinox becoming a top-level project for Eclipse, Felix being used as a container for Sling and Glassfish V3, and Spring-Modules being released. That said, a lot of people who are unfamiliar with OSGi ... are still unfamiliar with it, no matter how much the people who use OSGi regularly know about it.

It's a well known fact among those working on SOA projects there is no such thing as "SOA in a box" or a silver bullet for achieving an SOA, so much as it is a combination of software infrastructure, design philosophy, tools and, of course, buy in from the top brass at any organization. It's, in essence, a series of pieces, each of which gets a project closer to its full statement of intent and purpose for building a SOA. Up next, we will explore one of these pieces which aims at gaining you a few percentage points on your overall SOA gauge, and stands to influence a few more pieces that may already be part of your SOA strategy: the Eclipse Swordfish project.

In part 1, Aslam Khan, technical director of PBT Group, introduced us to OSGi. Today, in the final part, he completes his argument about OSGi's applicability in the enteprise. In part 1, he discussed OSGi's problem domain. There, he explained issues surrounding dynamic class management and how OSGi responds to these issues. In this final part, he tackles the two other problem areas outlined previously: the lack of versioning of Java classes and the lack of modularity in the context of classpath hell. How does OSGi fill these gaps? Finally, how ready is OSGi to be used for real? Aslam also answers this question.

The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) defines an architecture for developing and deploying modular applications and libraries. In this first article in a three-part introduction to OSGi, Sunil Patil gets you started with OSGi development concepts and shows you how to build a simple Hello World application using the Eclipse OSGi container implementation, Equinox. He also touches briefly on building service-oriented applications using OSGi and introduces OSGi's ServiceFactory and ServiceTracker classes.

In this two-part article, Aslam Khan, technical director of PBT Group, a software consultancy based in South Africa, introduces you to OSGi and discusses its relevance specifically in the context of the enterprise. What is the exact problem domain of OSGi in this area? In this first part, he uses code snippets to show how the issues surrounding dynamic class management can be tackled. -- Geertjan Wielenga, JavaLobby Zone Leader