Here's a great quote, from the blog of JBoss's VP of engineering: "In the last few weeks, the amount of noise around OSGi was embarrassing." He calls OSGi a "placebo" (though later backtracks and admits that it's "a decent spec." It's certainly true that a lot of folks are getting lathered up about it -- and probably with a bit more reason than he assumes. Sun's Andi Egloff cheerfully admits to drinking the OSGi Kool-Aid (only he uses a Matrix metaphor, which is probably more tasteful than mine), outlining a lot of OSGi's benefits. (An end to classpath hell! Easy to make a stand-alone distribution! More deployment options!) OSGi may also be coming together with JSR277 (though will versioning numbers be a problem?). The most succinct description I've heard yet of OSGi's promise is SOA in a JVM, which should have developers and lovers of buzzwords alike salivating.

And just in case you thought that JavaWorld wasn't on the bandwagon, we've recently published part one and part two of a series on the subject; part 3 is coming soon!