Re: Jini vs/and OSGi

Adrian wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Would anyone care to comment on where they see things heading with the
> aforementioned specifications? There seems to be significant functional overlap
> in current implementations. My impression is that OSGi is gaining a lot of steam
> (mostly due to the huge success of the Eclipse project, I suppose) and will
> probably be evolving to offer more and more of what Jini does. While
> Jini/Javaspaces has also been in the news recently, OSGi seems to be leading in
> developer/tool maker mindshare and there is a lot of 'real' work done in terms
> of advancing the spec. This article, written at the end of 2005,
> http://www.osgi.org/blog/2005/11/why-did-we-let-jini-out-of-osgi-r4.html doesn't
> doesn't make it sound very promising for Jini (viewed through the subjective
> eyes of the OSGi Alliance at least). I'm curious why there was no one (I'm
> thinking GigaSpaces or Dan C., for example) to beat the drums for Jini to be at
> least kept in the "Recommended" section of the OSGi spec.
>

Personally, I had no involvement or awareness of what was going on.  So
I couldn't have banged a drum even if I'd wanted to.

I have had feedback since about why's and wherefore's and as it happens,
there's some work to fit Jini's own packaging model into the OSGi mould
which I am aware of.

> Would it make sense to think of a JavaSpace as an OSGi service instead of a Jini
> one when and if OSGi evolves to provide service lookup across a grid? Are the
> security/classloader issues mentioned in the article areas that Jini will
> address in the near term?
>

Haven't read the article but Jini 2.x has pretty strong security.  As to
"fixing classloader issues" can't comment until I see what issues are
being referred too.

To the best of my knowledge, until very recently the OSGi folks had zero
familiarity with Jini 2.x and work in R3 was all around Jini 1.x which
was a totally different beast.

> The following presentation talks about using OSGi and Jini together, so not
> everyone seems to agree on where the future is headed for both specs.
> http://www.jini.org/wiki/10th_JCM_Sessions#Service_oriented_components_on_the_grid_using_OSGi_and_Jini
>

Well, the long and the short of it is that neither spec is dependent on
or needs the other.

That's not to say that there isn't benefit in the two efforts working
together but that's all about politics not tech.

Dan.

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