Over the last 12 months I continue to be amazed by the investment and adoption of the OSGi standard in the enterprise software world. For instance, IBM hosting Websphere on OSGI, BEA announcing their msa strategy is using OSGi, Spring support for OSGi, JoNas support, and a slew of Apahce projects (Directory, Cocoon, James, Tuscany, Geronimo) using OSGi and of course essentially anyone using Eclipse via Equinox is using OSGi.
These are some major corporate and open source adopters. However, if you then look at what is getting reported in the media and blogsphere there seems to be very little written. Of course there are exceptions, EclipseZone just did a great series on OSGi. InfoQ gives it decent coverage. The question becomes why is there so little written on OSGi and should we care?
OSGi is well on the way to becoming the first component model that spans embedded, desktop and server applications. OSGi started in the embedded industry and continues to have strong adoption in this space. As previously mentioned, OSGi is now breaking out on the server, so we might now actually have one software component model that finally allows for the convergence of embedded and enterprise IT software development.
Things are changing in terms of OSGi coverage. The guys at Interface 21 are doing a great job talking about their support for OSGi. I also think next week at EclipseCon there will be lots of OSGi news. For instance, Parmeus is talking about their vision of SOA/OSGi and Eclipse. The OSGi Developer Conference is co-located with EclipseCon, so it is a great opportunity to highlight the synergies between Eclipse and OSGi.
