OSGI and Spring?

[mmc]

Anyone used Spring together with OSGI (eclipse 3.2) ?

I am evaluationg which component architecture to use and am unsure if OSGI and Spring would play together now and in the future. For now I have more or less come to the conclusion that these technologies are more complementary than competitors.

Basically I am thinking of using both with OSGI bundles on the macro scale and Spring inside each the bundles.

However before I get too deep I would like to know what you Spring experts think? Good idea ? Any experience with Spring+OSGI ? Problems ?

Thanks!

Cheers,
Morten

[memestorm]

I agree, this would be pretty interesting. See this thread on Eclipse+Server side components. I've been thinking about components in Spring too, which you can read about here.

[trisberg]

There is some osgi code in the sandbox - spring/sandbox/src/org/springframework/osgi

I'm not sure what state it's in but worth a look.

[darius.schier]

We use Spring together with osgi which works pretty good.
We even use AndroMDA to generate all the dump stuff. Everything integrates smoothly beside Hibernate (which causes us headache right now). If you try to reference a table attribute from one bundle to another (if an application context sits inside of each bundle) you get MappingExceptions.

[Rod Johnson]

OSGi integration is a fairly strategic direction for the Spring team. It's not going to be released in the Spring 2.0 timeframe, which is our current priority, but expect big things after that! Also, there seems to be a lot of interest in this in the OSGi community.

[mmc]

Thank you all. Glad that my interest in combining Spring + eclipse OSGi is shared and that the Spring team are looking at supporting this in the future (Spring 3.0? Where/When :-))

[Rod Johnson]

Spring 3.0? Where/When

We don't yet have a release date in mind, but there is already OSGi integration code in the Spring sandbox. As the Spring model already offers powerful extension points such as proxying FactoryBeans, this sits happily on top of the present Spring core, so we don't need to do a bunch of rework to productize it.

I expect we will release something this summer.