Spring OSGi Status

Question

What is the status of the current developments around Spring and OSGi?

It looks like things have gotten a bit quiet lately.

The latest version of the doc at (http://docs.spring.io/osgi/) is from 2009.

I see some announcements that Spring DM has become Eclipse Gemini Blueprint (http://www.eclipse.org/gemini/blueprint/documentation/migration/). But also there, the latest release is from August 2012.

Is Spring and OSGi a dead path? If so, what other options are there to make a spring application modular (e.g. allow deployment, starting, stopping & updating of a module within a running JVM)?

Thanks

Answer 1

I agre that spring on OSGi is a dead end. There does not seem to be any real drive in it since springsource abandoned OSGi.

There are some alternatives though. The most stable and complete one is Apache Aries at the moment. It provides blueprint support which is similar to spring xml and some extensions like jpa container managed transactions. Be aware though that aries still contains much less functionality then spring. So for example annotation support is very limited.

Alternatives to Aries blueprint are Declarative Services and pax CDI. Declarative services is very small footprint and quite stable and has great supports for the dynamics of OSGi. On the other hand it is even more limited than blueprint. So for example there is no special jpa support at all.

PAX CDI aims to provide Java EE on OSGi using Open Webbeans or Weld + some extensions like Deltaspike. Together it would provide similar comfort like Java EE 6. Unfortunately it is not completely finished so at the moment I would not yet consider it ready for production use.

Answer 2

Gemini Blueprint is still active, right now gemini blueprint upgraded to support R5 and M2 is available in the eclipse nexus.