Websphere 6.1 and OSGi
So IBM are making good use of OSGi in Websphere 6.1. The OSGi security, module and lifecycle layers can provide can substantial benefits to a server runtime - capabilities like dynamically loading/updating/unloading bundles etc. These don’t come for free though - most require that the hosted bundles contain code that is properly ‘component-ized’ and adheres to the constraints imposed by the hosting OSGi runtime. Refactoring a legacy codebase like WebSphere to integrate with a new component model like OSGi would be, I imagine, a mammoth undertaking. And there is the question of how much of OSGi to integrate with - which subset of OSGi Services are worth using instead of legacy alternatives?
Still, they are stepping in the right direction and it is part of a larger trend. At ApacheCon Europe a month ago I bumped into one of the JOnAS guys who
told me they are building JOnAS 5 on OSGi. As I mentioned in the past, I expect most Java based servers worth their salt to be running on OSGi runtimes within a year or two, it’ll be interesting to see to what degree…
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