What does OSGi solve?

Question

I\'ve read on Wikipedia and other sites about OSGi, but I don\'t really see the big picture. It says that it\'s a component-based platform, and that you can reload modules a

Answer 1

OSGi makes your code throw NoClassDefFoundError and ClassNotFoundException for no apparent reason (most probably because you forgot to export a package in OSGi configuration file); since it has ClassLoaders it can make your class com.example.Foo fail to be cast to com.example.Foo since it's actually two different classes loaded by two different classloaders. It can make your Eclipse boot into an OSGi console after installing an Eclipse plugin.

For me, OSGi only added complexity (because it added one more mental model for me to grok), added annoyances because of exceptions; I never really needed the dynamicity it "offers". It was intrusive since it required OSGi bundle configuration for all modules; it was definitely not simple (in a larger project).

Because of my bad experience, I tend to stay away from that monster, thank you very much. I'd rather suffer from jar dependency hell, since that's way way more easily understandable than the classloader hell OSGi introduces.