Enterprise OSGi In Action

Appendix A. OSGi—the basics

OSGi is a big subject, and we’re not going to attempt to cover all of it in a single appendix. Instead, we’ll be going over the basics of OSGi at a high level. We’ll also delve into greater detail into some aspects of OSGi that may not be familiar to most readers, but that are important to understand when writing enterprise OSGi applications. For a more comprehensive introduction to OSGi and OSGi reference, have a look at OSGi in Action by Richard Hall, Karl Pauls, Stuart McCulloch, and David Savage (Manning, 2011).

A.1. Where did OSGi come from, and where is it going?

One of the stories of software engineering has been that of increasing abstraction and resulting improvements in modularity. The earliest programs ...