So if this information is produced at build time, added into a jar's manifest, 
what is the difference with using a convention of something like a maven 
artifact to provide version and update support?

On Nov 18, 2009, at 744PM, Peter Firmstone wrote:

> I've been having a private email discussion with one of the OSGi people, he 
> instantly understood my problem domain.  They also have pondered the problem 
> of Binary compatibility over time and the potential of static analysis.
> 
> I guess that makes sense as this is really the problem domain of OSGi, not 
> jini, it was suggested that results from static analysis performed at build 
> time should be  included as additional metadata in bundles.  That changes my 
> implementation, I was going to perform the static analysis at the codebase, 
> however this should be done at build time. Having said that, it would be 
> still useful to confirm the metadata is correct using static analysis at the 
> codebase for security reasons.
> 
> Quote: "I think this is worthwhile for OSGi. It probably fits in the area of 
> management agents, i.e., you could build some functionality on top of OSGi 
> that uses this additional information for deploying updates."
> 
> So I guess that jini codebase services that distribute OSGi bundles would be 
> very useful for code evolution over time in a distributed environment where 
> OSGi is used to control local JVM package visibility and sharing of 
> compatible bytecode between jini services.
> 
> The best part about OSGi bundles is that developers aren't forced to use OSGi 
> or the metadata, bundles can still be used as ordinary jar files.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Peter.

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