The Road Less Taken

After years of labor, OSGI has started to gain critical mass. In fact, OSGI is popping up all over the place: Eclipse, Spring, SCA discussions, etc. It seems like almost everyone is interested in leveraging OSGI. I won't go in to the details of OSGI, except to say that there are some genuinely useful things that can be done with OSGI for building product software: some of the most interesting capabilities have to do with dynamic loading and unloading. Sun has spearheaded an alternative model in JSR, 277. It is interesting to look at the reaction of the OSGI community to 277. Will this be the dividing line that marked the transition to a new generation of middleware technology?