What's the "official" way to integrate Spring into OSGI

Question

long time ago I have already been working with Spring in an OSGI context. At this time there was a subproject called Spring Dynamic Modules being the first address for an integration of the two frameworks.

Coming back to the scene some years later the situation is not clear anymore (for me). Spring Dynamic Modules has migrated to Blueprint and there are 2 major implementations Aries and Gemini where the first one seems to be more in competition with Spring than complementing it and the latter seems to be small and with very rare release cycles.

The official Spring page has no documentation at all any more concerning OSGI.

So can anyone with a better standing / know how in Spring help and tell me what's currently (11/2014) the "official" or preferred way to integrate Spring applications into an OSGI environment?

Many thanks & best regards Rabe

Answer 1

Official according to whom? There is nobody qualified to give an "official" answer on this, there are only common practices.

As you note, the Eclipse Gemini implementation of Blueprint is abandonware. The Apache Aries implementation is a live project though, and it is not so much in competition with Spring as a clean-room implementation of the Blueprint specification without reference to the old Spring source code.

As such, I recommend migrating to the Aries Blueprint implementation as the most practical and sensible way forwards.

Answer 2

Spring does not officially support OSGi nowadays. Spring EBR repository was closed (I guess as they had said they would close it) and some company took over the content in Virgo EBR repo. I do not know if it is still alive.

If you have a choice, do not use Spring within OSGi. It is a great technology, but it was designed to work well in monoholitic systems. There is a good blog post why not to use Spring, blueprint and similar technologies within OSGi: http://blog.osgi.org/2014/09/how-should-i-use-guicespringblueprint.html