OSGi's Popularity in Numbers

Just some interesting statistics that I found out by scanning Maven Central. I've got all the metadata in a Mongo database so it is easy to analyze. The current database consists of over 426 thousand JARs organized in more than 46 thousand projects. I have been scanning Maven central since last year and these numbers seems to have almost doubled, which is a scary though if this continues at that exponential rate (especially for Sonatype who seems to pay the bandwidth and storage costs of Maven Central).

Almost 10% of the 46000 projects in Maven Central today are OSGi bundles. The most surprising part for me was that the the official OSGi Core JAR actually comes in at #36. For the official OSGi Core JAR, there are more than 24 thousand transitively inbound projects. It is more popular than dom4j (#43) or Apache commons collections (#45).

So what does this ranking number mean? I uses an algorithm similar to Google Pagerank, a project is more important when it has more inbound maven dependencies (compile and runtime scope) based on the latest revision of a project. A staggering more than half of the 46 thousand projects have a transient dependency on the OSGi JAR. Staggering because it says probably more about the infectious nature of the maven dependency model than OSGi's popularity.

There are over 50 projects that contain the package org.osgi.framework. In overall ranking Eclipse Equinox at #78 and Apache Felix at #216. That said, Apache Felix also provides a compile only JAR with the OSGi packages that comes in at #100. When looking at this list it turns out that the OSGi Jars appear in several incarnations. I even found the release 3 JARs: 300k for core and compendium combined. The compendium, a JAR that is only used by projects that are really OSGi, comes in at #50.

The numbers look very good for OSGi and I think it indicates that we will see more and more projects providing OSGi metadata. As David Bosschaert wrote earlier this year, if you need help adding this metadata then let us know.

So which project is #1? I know you've been dying to ask. Well, the top 5 is:

1. org.hamcrest : hamcrest-core
2. junit : junit
3. javax.activation : activation
4. javax.mail : mail
5. org.apache.geronimo.genesis.config : logging-config

Peter Kriens @pkriens