Letter to our OSGi User Community RE: the Java Platform Module System (JPMS)

Letter to the OSGi User Community:

With the JCP Executive Committee’s acceptance of JSR 376, the Java Platform Module System (JPMS) will be included in the Java SE 9 release. The OSGi Alliance has recently completed an analysis of JPMS and what it means for our user community.

We recognize that many of you have invested in OSGi technology over a number of years and have business-critical systems that rely on OSGi, so you may question if and how Java SE 9 may impact you. Please be assured that OSGi will continue to operate with its full capabilities on top of the new Java SE 9 platform.

However, the modularity capabilities in OSGi and JPMS are not the same. Our modularity experience, earned through the evolution of OSGi, has proven there are specific requirements in modularizing an application that is assembled with code from multiple sources, which have independent release cycles. Given these requirements, JPMS is not suitable for most real-world applications and we therefore caution against the use of JPMS for the application layer.

As you know, the modularization of an application, where code and dependencies are pulled from many independently created sources, presents a different set of challenges than those faced in the modularization of a defined and closely managed platform. This difference is especially true when the entire code base is managed by a single entity and released all at once, like the Java platform.

For more than 15 years, OSGi has proven successful in modularizing user applications by using dynamic resolution and semantic versioning, as well as supporting isolation, multiple class loaders and dependency injection. With its goal of modularizing the platform, JPMS has been able to rely upon static dependency resolution and ignore versioning, deferring responsibility for versioning to others.

Clearly, both OSGi and JPMS will co-exist and effectively operate in this application/platform demarcated environment. The modularization of the Java platform with Java SE 9 is a significant step forward for Java as a whole, and OSGi technology’s role in application-level modularization is as important today as it has been for previous releases of Java.

If you have any technical questions, please post them to osgi-dev@mail.osgi.org or, if you prefer an off-list inquiry, email modularity@osgi.org.

Sincerely,

Dan Bandera

President

OSGi Alliance

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Join Us for OSGi in Ghent - Weds, Sept 20, 2017

The OSGi Alliance is holding its next technical Expert Group meetings in Ghent later this month.

On Weds, Sept 20, 2017 you can join us for an evening of OSGi. Organised in collaboration with BeJUG.

Registration is required as places are limited so be sure to sign up on the BeJUG meetup event page.

ACA-IT Solutions are kindly hosting the event and providing sandwiches while everyone assembles from 18.30 hrs.  And then the evening kicks off with a welcome from 19.00hrs.

The agenda for the rest of the evening is:

• 19.10 hrs - What's coming in the OSGi R7 Specification (David Bosschaert & Carsten Ziegeler)
• 19.50 hrs - OSGi Push Streams, scalable event processing - pushing the limits (Tim Ward)
• 20.30 hrs - OSGi; from amateur to invited contributor (Tim Verbelen)

There will also be opportunity to network and ask questions with your peers and OSGi Expert Group members.

The event is being held at ACA-IT Solutions Ghent office (Voorhavenlaan, 31/008, Ghent). ACA have been actively using OSGi for many years and support the community by committing to open source OSGi projects. Thanks also to BeJUG for their support in promoting the event.

We hope you can join us. Don't forget to REGISTER in advance.