Sessions at JAX London 2011 - Autumn Edition about OSGi on Wednesday 2nd November

Enterprise applications are often long-lived, traditionally becoming more difficult and expensive to maintain over time. This talk will show how modular design and OSGi technology can help prevent this 'system rot' and enable more dynamic behaviour. We will outline the programming model and demonstrate running applications being maintained and extended on WebSphere Application Server version 8.

The talk will cover a bit of background first to set things up: what is a module, why do we need a module system, summary of Java's existing support for modularity. Then it will move on to give a comparison of OSGi's and Jigsaw's dependency models. Pros and cons of each model in different environments will be discussed. Finally, opportunities and challenges for interoperability: from the perspective of both application developers (who may need to integrate modules from both kinds) and from library module developers (who may need to target both module systems).

OSGi is a dynamic Java modularity technology that originally was exploited mostly by constrained Java runtime systems. With the release of OSGi Enterprise 4.2, the role of OSGi has been extended into the enterprise, alongside what has traditionally been developed using JEE. This session will cover the best practices for developing OSGi Enterprise applications and OSGi bundles.