Can OSGi prevent bad practices in modular application design?

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi,

I'm wondering if OSGi helps to avoid or prevent bad practices like circular dependencies or access to private parts of a module which shouldn't be published to "consumers" of a module.

As I wrote in other posts here I only have practical experience with the module system of the NetBeans platform. So I only know that it can help you avoid for example the problems above which I would consider bad practices. Does OSGi also offer mechanisms to avoid this or even prevent "incorrect" usage of modules and dependencies?

Marco

[Hong Anderson]

From experience of using Eclipse Platform which uses OSGi, it can export only necessary packages.

For example, we have 2 modules, Module A and Module B. Module A has 10 packages, I can export only 5 packages, so Module B can access only those 5 packages.

About circular dependencies, IMO, we don't need a tool to prevent it to happen, it's wrong, and in most cases it's unacceptable.
If we use Eclipse we couldn't even compile if there are circular dependencies between projects.

OSGi may be able to prevent that to happen but for me that doesn't much necessary.