Project Jigsaw - Putting Together the Pieces for Java 7

When I read about Project Jigsaw recently, the resurrection of the plan to modularize the JDK and follow OSGi I was between two minds about it. But the main thing is that this is great news - of course we should try and continue to improve the JDK and reduce it's footprint, as has been done in Java 6 Update 10. Also, it's good news that JSR 277 is deferred for the time being as there was some conflict about how the proposal for versioning, which differed from the OSGI versioning scheme. 

A lot of players in the Java industry outside of Sun have already moved to OSGI, and in a lot of cases, Equinox. IBM, SAP, SpringSource and the BEA parts of Oracle , are using Equinox as the platform for their application servers. As Ian Skerrett pointed out, Sun's Glassfish has adopted OSGi, using Felix and supporting Equinox. Until now, we haven't seen an appreciation from Sun about this trend in the industry.

Peter Kriens has put together an article about the Jigsaw news. It gives a great insight into the history of the various JSR's related to modularity in Java. He sees this as a chance to get it right, noting that Sun's decision to get OSGi as part of Java7 is a step in the right direction.

This whole mess of the last three and a half years is caused by a process in the JCP that allows people to get started with solutions before they negotiated the requirements with the stakeholders.

It's easy to agree with this. And it's encouraging that the effort will be taking place within the OpenJDK, providing some more visibility into what's going on.

Neil Bartlett has also put together a nice article about Project Jigsaw entitled Hope, Fear and Project Jigsaw. It goes through the potential benefits and issues behind this initiative.

The future then is in Sun’s hands, for now the rest of us can only observe where they go with this. There is hope and opportunity in the Jigsaw announcement, but Sun has abused the trust of the OSGi community before so it’s naturally difficult to trust them now. However, I talked to Peter Kriens (the OSGi Alliance’s Director of Technology) and he said his plan is to work with Sun as closely as possible. Let’s call this his Sunshine Policy: by exposing Mark Reinhold and his team to OSGi as much as possible, he hopes to win them over. It could happen. Sunshine didn’t work for Kim Dae-jung, but it might for Peter… most developers I know have been won over by OSGi once they truly understood it.

In general I think it's a good thing - Sun seems to be working with the OSGi community in making sure they are compatiable and we'll all get to see what's going on through the OpenJDK project. OSGi was touted by many as the tech buzzword of 2008 - with more people realising the power of OSGi I think it will continue to be one of the main talking points in the development community. So, what are your thoughts on Project Jigsaw?