Is OSGi production ready?

Question

I've recently discovered OSGi and it seems very promising. I would like to ask people that already uses OSGi's implementations, to know if they are production ready. Do they provide the features generally required in production environment? I've read there are many implementations, but I've only looked at Apache Felix.

Thanks

Answer 1

OSGi is definately ready for production. Almost all big Java EE servers have switched to OSGi for their core. The bigger question is if your development team and your projects are already ready for OSGi. Most developers do not yet have solid OSGi experience so make sure the developers are trained well. If you have existing projects it can be a lot of effort to convert them to OSGi. (Depends a bit how well designed they are. Well designed loosely coupled systems typically can be ported relatively easily).

Felix is a good choice as OSGi framework. I would recommend to use it together with Apache Karaf. It adds a lot of interesting functionality to Felix.

Answer 2

OSGi has been production ready for a long time, although new and sometimes experimental features are added all the time, so you should ask yourself this question for individual parts of OSGi. The basics like Core and Declarative Services are rock solid.

Answer 3

OSGi is production ready. There are many production systems in the enterprise and embedded domain. Many of the Java Application Servers have an OSGi Core. The Eclipse IDE is OSGi based. Next to Felix there are other Open Source implementations (Eclipse Equinox and Knopflerfish) and commercial implementation from ProSyst.

Answer 4

OSGi delivers what it specifies and there are production-quality systems available. However, I would add a caveat: making the bundle hot-swapping dream come true requires close collaboration from the programmer and is quite easy to break.