Foreword

It must have been in 2006 that I got a call as OSGi’s Technical Director from Adrian Colyer, CTO of Interface21, the company that was the source of the Spring Framework. Yes, I’d heard of the Spring Framework, and I understood that it was a great improvement over existing techniques for writing software for the enterprise. As a developer who had gained most of his experience in developing embedded and middleware applications, I found all that XML rather foreign. However, I’d noticed the enterprise world’s interest in OSGi, so I too was interested.

It turned out that Interface 21, BEA, and Oracle were considering creating support for OSGi in the Spring Framework. Spring is very good at configuring an application built out of simple objects that use, among other things, the simplified Spring interfaces to communicate with the world. However, Spring did not provide any support for modularity. In contrast, OSGi provides strong modularity support but it’s not strong in configuration and it had no services in the enterprise space. This was a match made in heaven!