How to deploy OSGi apps and dependencies?

Question

OSGi seems to have an excellent benefit of having small deployable artifacts by not wrapping dozens of JAR dependencies into a lib directory. However, I can\'t find anything tha

Answer 1

If you create an OSGi application and a classic Java application that do the same thing and use the same libraries then you'll need exactly the same set of JARs. The big difference is being able to explicitly define your dependencies (and possibly produce more granular JARs for your application).

There's only one pure OSGi-based server that I know of (Eclipse's Virgo, previously Spring's DM Server). Glassfish and Websphere have support for OSGi, but I haven't played with them so I can't say much. What I can say is that all of them require an OSGi container and that's usually Eclipse's Equinox or Apache's Felix.

Your question seems to really be about provisioning the application (working out what needs to be deployed). I know that for Maven 3.0 they've done a bunch of stuff working with Eclipse's P2 provisioning framework.

For your application are you deploying an EAR or WAR? For either of those, your build system will need to produce the archive with all dependencies or it won't work. It's a bit confusing on why you have a problem because people use Maven because it does the transitive dependency management for their builds.