OSGi or Impala?

Question

I have been deep-divining in osgi from past few months and must say impressed by it. In recent days I saw one blog saying that impala is better than osgi. I heard about impala but never got a chance to deep-dive into it.

I just want to know that which one better Impala or OSGi? Is anyone is working on impala?

For developing large enterprise application one should go with osgi or impala and why?

Answer 1

Impala is an implementation of a framework from one person (company?). OSGi is a specification that is supported by all major IT vendors. It has been around for 10 years. There are 4 very popular open source implementations of OSGi available: Concierge, Knopflerfish, Felix and Equinox.

OSGi is used in thousands of embedded applications, it is the core of Eclipse, IBM and Oracle use it in strategic applications.

Though this of course does not say anything about technical superiority, you could imagine that the OSGi specifications have had a bit more real life weathering ...

Answer 2

You might find the following article useful for understanding when one might be more beneficial than the other:

http://osgi.dzone.com/articles/impala-alternative-module

Of note is the observation that

with Impala you don't get versioning and reloading of third party libraries within the application

which is an important difference with OSGi