Saturday, July 3, 2010

OSGi and JEE. Is it possible?

I am curious about others experiences OSGi with JEE? OSGi seems like a solution to dependency collisions, allows for versioned modules, and hot deployment. I've seen several different variations on using OSGi with JEE. It seems application servers are starting to pick up on it which is a great thing. However I was wondering if anyone has used it for local native services? I see people use it for Servlets and serving simple JSPs. I was hoping to use it for local native Java services that allow exposing interfaces in Java like web services do but don't bring any dependencies into the picture like normal POJO Java Services do. Unlike web services OSGi services should not have the overhead of transferring things over the wire. I've saw forum postings where people have troubles using JEE resources that are exposed through JNDI. Is this really an issue that is of concern? Also if people have any tools or tips for working with OSGi bundles it would be much appreciated.