A good sign of a healthy ecosystem is the emergence of competing solutions. Eclipse has long provided tooling support for OSGi. Now it seems NetBeans and IntelliJ are ready to provide OSGi support. The upcoming NetBeans 6.9 release features support for OSGi, which James Gosling calls ‘getting pretty sweet.’ IntelliJ has also announced the integration and support for the OSGi based Spring dmServer (now available as Eclipse Virgo).
Great news from both NetBeans and IntelliJ. Even better news for OSGi, since the competition amongst the tools providers is a great sign of the interest in OSGi. I hope NetBeans and IntelliJ continue to improve their OSGi support and maybe offering tighter integration with EclipseRT technology.
