By puredanger
via adaptevolve.blogspot.com
Published: Nov 03 2009 / 09:56
As an ex-Physicists, I'm naturally interested in concepts such as 'Complexity', 'Information' and 'Entropy'; and while I agree with Hal's sentiments, I feel uneasy when the 'complexity' word is used within such broad brush general arguments. Indeed; I find myself asking, in what way is a modular system 'simpler'? Surely a modular system exposes previously hidden internal structure, and while this necessary complexity, the system IS visibly more complex!
Comments
Jacek replied ago:
I have nothing but the opposite experience from working with OSGi...endless lost hours of productivity hunting down ClassCastExceptions or 3rd party bundle jars...not to mention unit tests and building is much more complex.
If all you need is handling conflicting libraries, I suggest you give Maven or Ivy a good try before you throw yourself into the lost productivity pit that is OSGi.
All the members on our team hated that thing...one even said "how did we bring this thing upon ourself?"
And if you want decoupling, try DI.
There are a lot of other alternatives before you have to really think of OSGi. And then don't kid yourself that it's gonna be a smooth ride.
When it works, it works great. But when something breaks in OSGi tracking it down will take you endless hours of trial-and-error looking
at bundles, their exported versions and namespaces, etc, etc.
My sole OSGi project was a long nightmare that I was all too happy to forget. Don' believe the hype.
pzoio replied ago:
If you want the benefits of modularity without all of the complexity of OSGi, have a look at Impala (http://www.impalaframework.org/). It offers true application modularity but in a simpler, more intuitive and test-friendly way.
Voters For This Link (15)
Voters Against This Link (1)