Examining OSGi from an ideal enterprise software component model

Abstract

Component-based software development is becoming a discipline in software engineering community, but it still immature in enterprise application development. OSGi gives some insights for component-based development (CBD). By proposing an ideal component model for enterprise applications, we analyze the performance of OSGi against such a model. The result shows that OSGi is still lack of some advanced component features for CBD, although it provides a modular solution superior to plain Java. The result also contributes both to the decision making for the software developers who want to select the OSGi component technology and to the improvements to be made to OSGi.