Glassfish as an OSGi Container

Question

I'm evaluating OSGi containers and the subject came up of using Glassfish to contain my OSGi application components. My question is: Is Glassfish good for this? Does anybody have any experience using it in this way?

Background: - The application is not a Java EE application, it's a Spring application. - I've been evaluating Felix + Tomcat. - I've never used Glassfish but it has some features that our operations people are interested in.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Have a look at http://java.dzone.com/news/from-osgi-glassfish-5-steps

Answer 2

The fastest OSGi container is probably NetBeans' http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/JDeveloper

For more info see http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-osgi-quickstart.html

Answer 3

While Glassfish may be a good candidate for an OSGi container, it is fairly large, due to the fact that it is primarily a Java EE container. If I were writing an OSGi application, I would use Karaf/Felix as the container. Its small, OSGi specific, OSGi 4.2 compliant, in active development (bugs get fixed quickly), and has a large group of OSGi users.

Answer 4

GlassFish is IMO a serious candidate and I would definitely look at it. Some resources:

• GlassFish/OSGi Dashboard
• GlassFish and OSGi (and Sahoo) at EclipseCon 2010
• GlassFish v3, OSGi Equinox Felix by Jerome Dochez and Ludovic Champenois

Answer 5

The demo Jesper mentions uses OSGi declarative services. See this detailed blog entry GlassFish can also be installed on an existing OSGi runtime (Felix or Equinox). Current OSGi efforts are focusing on hybrid apps and the OSGI enterprise spec. It let's JPA, JDBC, HTTP and other services to be packaged as OSGi bundles.