the corner office

The name isn't catchy enough, but the SpringSource Application Platform is interesting. Essentially, it's OSGi meets Spring, a modular application server; a comment on the TSS thread says that it's trying to do for servers what Eclipse RCP has done for clients.

What does that mean right now? I don't see this replacing ye olde containers just yet, but it is another indication that OSGi is taking off. As I've said before, I'm somewhat ambivalent about OSGi. It's a powerful way to put together large and complex applications (like IDEs and application servers), but I'm not so sure if the effort is justified when building smaller applications where a few jars and config files will do. So the appeal of things like the SSAP (or whatever the hell it ends up being called) comes down to just how much of the additional drudgery is necessary for business-as-usual apps, and/or how much can be made to go away with good IDE tooling.