Kirk Knoernschild from Burton Group has published the results to an informal survey he fielded on OSGi usage. I don’t think Kirk or anyone would claim this is a statistically significant survey or the sample was unbiased but I do think it raises some interesting results.
- The majority of people are using OSGi for Web applications. This actually surprises me since I thought most OSGi usage was in the embedded space and and maybe rich client (ie Eclipse RCP). However, this is great news for things like RAP and server side Equinox
- No surprise that ‘understanding how to use it most effectively’ is the greatest challenge. As Alex said a great opportunity for a book and training. We also need to make sure we provide great documentation for Equinox.
- It is interesting that a large majority would consider deploying their software as OSGi bundles. I have often wondered if people will use OSGi as a programming model or use some higher level model on top of OSGi. It would seem there is interest in using OSGi as a programming model.
- Equinox seems to be well known and adopted to those that are using OSGi. However, it is apparent that the other OSGi implementations such as Felix and Knopflerfish are receiving attention. We need a healthy number of OSGi implementations to create a market, so this is a good thing. Of course, I hope Equinox continues to be the dominant choice for deployments.
Kirk’s conclusions are also on the mark, we need more vendors with a clear and public OSGi strategy to accelerate enterprise adoption and OSGi will have its place in the next generation application platform.
Some interesting stuff and I hope Kirk and the Burton Group keep sharing these types of results.
