Jeff, Paul and Simon-
I took 2 or 3 serious weeks making an effort to componentize (OSGI style) an existing application and found that every dependency that I ran into was a nightmare. Libraries from the Apache Software Foundation were already OSGI enabled. Almost nothing else was. This meant that I had to create OSGI-enabled versions of every dependent library that the application used and one depended on another, and that depended on another etc. In the end I gave up and decided that an application needs to be designed with OSGI from the beginning and some standard mechanism for OSGI-ifying non-OSCGified libraries needs to be established before I'm interested in writing OSGI applications.
I hope this doesn't sound negative, because I really did see a lot of advantages to OSGI and felt that it was one of few ways available for solving the problem of application plug-ins, but it was painful to saw the least.
So my questions to you...
What are the options for handling non-OSGI-ified dependencies when creating OSGI-enabled applications?
What are the ways for handling non-OSGI-fied dependencies in the context of
Maven (which is how we are handling all of our dependencies)?
How is Project Jigsaw going to play into all of this?
Thank you and welcome to JavaRanch.
Josh