Can Spring Boot be used with OSGi? If not, any plans to have an OSGi Spring Boot?

Question

Can Spring Boot be used with OSGi? If not, any plans to have an OSGi Spring Boot (Apache Felix or Eclipse Equinox)? In my opinion, cloud applications must be highly modular and

Answer 1

There's actually plenty of good reasons for deploying Spring Boot into OSGi, the main one being performance, particularly startup performance if your Spring Boot service is a functional service (i.e. it starts, returns results, ends). An application I'm currently beta testing in Spring Boot starts up in ~ 0.5 seconds deployed to Equinox versus 3.5 seconds on its own. Other reasons might be integration to an OSGi based application or Java EE server.

That said, you can also run OSGi from Spring Boot, for performance reasons I would probably favour Concierge as an OSGi implementation over Felix or Equinox, simply due to its small size (unless your app needs all the features of the bigger implementations.

Another alternative would be to wrap the Spring libraries used by your Spring Boot application into MSF4J (from WSO2). This doesn't take much work and can give you a 10x faster startup with 1/10th the memory usage.