What is OSGi for?

Neil Bartlett explained exactly what OSGi is good for on his blog this weekend. This was in response to Chris Adamson’s article on java.net admitting that despite all of the OSGi news lately, he still didn’t know what he would ever use it for. [Fundamentally, OSGi is a module system that allows you to define dependencies between jar files… and much more.] You can find a good newbie explaination of OSGi on TheServerSide.com and further information in Neil’s free book OSGi in Practice.