Re: Jini vs/and OSGi

Dennis Reedy <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.java.sun.jini
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>
>
> That's what I would've thought, but the action of removing Jini as  
> a recommended
> spec to track/follow/integrate with, by the OSGi alliance seems to  
> indicate
> otherwise.

I personally was not tracking that announcement or move over in OSGi  
land (not sure who from the Jini community was). One can never be  
sure of the motivation behind this, and from the description o the  
link you provided I would have to say that the author did not keep up  
with the Jini technology, the community and the many improvements made.

Regardless, I think its moot right now.

> Recall that OSGi's initial focus was embedded devices (which could be
> networked) and being able to dynamically manage services on these.  
> Sounds
> familiar...

Yes, quite aware of OSGi's initial domain. The categorization of Jini  
technology in the embedded space has (and always will be) something  
that was incorrect. For OSGi it made sense, for Jini it never did.

>
> This, along with the imminent release (around May) of OSGi support  
> from the
> Spring framework (http://www.springframework.org/osgi - one of the  
> most popular
> and widely used open source server-side (primarily) do-all glue  
> frameworks),
> points to a clear move, IMO, to bring OSGi to the enterprise space.
>
> What horse to bet on?

Why do you feel you need to bet on a horse here? OSGi (and Spring)  
are great for wiring up components within a VM. They are both  
somewhat ill-suited for distributed computing. Yes Spring has  
remoting, but it doesnt address the wider issues that deal with  
discovery, federation, fault detection, recovery, partial failure,  
etc ...

Using OSGi as a micro-kernel architecture and Spring as a component  
model still perpetuates the stand-alone app server model, albeit one  
that can have module (bundles) easily installed. It does not address  
the reality that there need to be collections of services discovered  
through the network, that when harnessed together can deliver  
scalable adaptive systems.

There are a number of projects in (and through) this community that  
offer these advanced capabilities (along with Spring support I might  
add). I run one, its called Rio. On Rio's roadmap is OSGi  
interoperability, both from a micro-kernel architecture basis and the  
dynamic provisioning and allocation of bundles. There is also the  
Newton project that provides OSGi and Jini interoperability. I  
encourage you to investigate these and others. Links to projects can  
be found at the wiki here (http://www.jini.org).

As Jim Waldo pointed out, the “Highlander Principle” (“there can be  
‘only one’”) is a fallacy. Why perpetuate it.

Regards

Dennis
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