The screencast below brings up many different approaches of modularity systems in Java. Hmmm. I never even considered anything beyond OSGi.

• OSGi
• JSR 277
• JSR 294
• NetBeans Modules
• Maven
• SMS
• Jigsaw

Jaroslave Tulach, the guy who wrote the netbeans module system is interviewed here, it's a great discussion.

I'm a big Groovy enthusiast, but I only use it myself for build/deploy scripts.

A real pro demonstrated Groovy's power last night:

Paul Woods ran us through 90 minutes of groovy features last night, and demonstrated how powerful the language can be in the hands of someone who works with it exclusively every day for a year.

Onboarding looks pretty jacked up!

Speaking of jacked, I highjacked the video to make my blog look better, but I'd recommend going to the Sonatype blog. This is sharp stuff. 

If you know the guys at Sonatype - I know Jason anyway, and to me seems every bit as fruity oddball as myself or any of us - but just this one time - I'm accusing him of really hitting the freaking nail on the head.

There's a couple things I'd like to point out that make this an insanely smart announcement.

... from the "Can't We All Just Get Along?" department, you may feel as I do... You want to be lazy where you can, and let these specific Java tools do your work for you. 

• Maven
• OSGI
• SpringOSGI
• m2eclipse

And of course, you want it to happen without them fighting each other, and without keeping multiple layers of duplicate metadata synched up in pom.xml, MANIFEST.MF, and gosh knows what other files. In other words, you want DRY.

Sounds great huh? Consider Tycho, if that's your situation. This is Sonatype's work in progress, which neither supports nor fights Spring OSGI, and lets you use the MANIFEST.MF file as your configuration instead of your pom.xml. Even works with p2, if that's you thing.

So I decided to take it for a spin, even though it isn't supposed to be ready yet.

Finding myself being in the strange position of being a "supporter" or enthusiast for a specific software shop. Mr Anti-Brand goes against pattern?

Well, maybe being a brand enthusiast is an anti-pattern for me personally, but it keeps on making sense for our little shop, regardless. At least in this one situation.

From Gosling (March 17 2010)

James Gosling is quoted in this article in the ServerSide to have described the features of JEE 6 centering around the modularity that comes from the use of OSGI Blueprints.

He's presented as being pretty positive on the whole affair.

The first thing you need, if you're going to do enterprise OSGI, is a starting template for a modular project.

5 minutes, right? We've all done this before. Right click in the IDE > new > project > yada yada

Not So Fast

True, that will do the trick in a non-OSGI world. But then there's all the other stuff like

Where Does OSGI fit into Your Daily Routine?

TVOM: Time Value of Money

TVOM is the elephant in the living room of software development.

Tool vendors create Value expressed as Time, and then comes their own tradeoff - a sucking sound that is supposed to be music to the developer's ears. If only that tradeoff was really music.

Decided On Ivy Instead Of Maven

Spent the last couple of days trying to set up an implementation of ant's ivy. This team is going to ant, but no way will they move to maven. So Ivy is the natural companion, I figured.

OK, couple of days is an exaggeration. I spent the last couple of days studying and reading all about it between interruptions, either way it took all my available extra time.