Can OSGi help reduce complexity?

Question

I saw lots of presentations on OSGi and i think it sounds promising for enforcing better modularization. Apparently \"hotdeployment\" and \"running different versions of x in pa

Answer 1

I used OSGI in one project (I admit - not very much). It provides good promises, but as @Arne said, you still need to think on your own about how you modularize.

OSGI did help our project because it made the architecture more stable. Breaking the modularization is more "difficult", so decisions that we made regarding how to modularize stayed valid for a longer time.
To put it differently - without OSGI, and under time pressure to deliver, sometimes you or your team members make compromises, shortcuts and other hacks, and the the original intent of the architecture is lost.

So OSGI didn't reduce the complexity per se, but it protected it from growing unnecessarily over time. I guess that is a good thing :)

I haven't used the hot deploy feature, so I can't comment about that.

To answer your last point, it did meet my expectations, but it required a learning curve and some adaption, and the payoff is only for long-term.

(as a side note, your question reminds me a bit of the adage that "maven is the awt of build systems")