[Springframework-developer] Combining Lightweight plug-ins and Spring OSGi support

[Bryant H. <bry...@ho...>]

Hi all,
  Just some quick questions/comments regarding Spring OSGi support.

  Last year I published an article on using Spring as the basis for a =
lightweight plug-in platform (http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/31835).  =
There was quite a bit of interest in the article at the time.  In there =
I mentioned that it was a lightweight approach as compared with =
industrial plug in platforms like Eclipse or OSGi.

  With OSGi support forthcoming in Spring, I've been thinking if it =
would be possible to take light weight plug-ins and drop them into an =
OSGi world so that there would be transparent development path from a =
light weight approach to full blown OSGi.

  My lightweight approach simply used the BeanFactoryPostProcessor =
abstraction in spring to allow plug-in beans to find their extension =
points and lace them together.  I'm wondering if an OSGi style extension =
point could be made to support this same approach, so light weight =
plug-ins could easily be transformed into OSGI bundles.

  I actually think that the OSGi programming model is different enough =
(and difficult enough) that providing a gateway of lightweight plug-ins =
(which are easy to add to any Spring application) to the more industrial =
OSGi approach makes a lot of sense.

  I'd be willing to do the legwork of exploring this sort of =
compatibility and donating the code to Spring if there's interest.

Thanks,

Bryant