OSGi in the Enterprise

Why is OSGi such a compelling proposition for the Enterprise?

OSGI provides a highly dynamic platform for modularising code and sharing services within a single VM. Combined with its lifecycle management capabilities, this has led to its great success in the embedded space.

Although the enterprise space is at the other end of the scale to the embedded space, there is a similar desire for programming and deployment models to be less monolithic and more dynamic. The anouncement of numerous OSGi initiatives by enterprise software vendors attests to the industry's consensus on this point.

Much of the answer to why the enterprise should be interested, lies in the lightweight component-based approach adopted by OSGi since its inception in 1999. OSGi offers the opportunity to move beyond the brittle monolithic Java™ application server, replacing this with a dynamic lightweight service framework into which components may be dynamically installed, managed and retired when no longer required. The OSGi service registry, a core platform service, allows atomic services to be, in-turn, dynamically wired into complex composite business or enterprise infrastructure services.

The improvements that OSGi makes over Java's traditional modularity techniques provide the basis for a true enterprise component marketplace, in which components by different vendors can really work together, and enterprises can choose the best components, not just the ones forced on them by their choice of vendor.

Commercial products and Open Source projects are now augmenting these key intra-JVM OSGi capabilities, with scaleable and robust inter-JVM distribution strategies. These are leveraging and building upon concepts core to the Java Jini™ distributed SOA framework. Such distributed Service Fabrics are extending OSGI's agility and life-cycle management capabilities beyond the single JVM to the complex distributed composite business systems running across next generation utility data centre infrastructure.