Seam percolated, and then germinated, but when I started to work with the example project, a few things jumped the rails: because I'm a glutton for punishment, and ganymede was nearing the bomb bay door, I tried to setup the JBoss Tools, which have only been targeting ganymede very recently and through a daily build. That was great for the first day or two, then it turned into a plant-based man-eating nightmare. You know, we should have stages like they do in cancer care, in IT: this was a stage 4: looped meaningless error messages squealing about some unknown thing having gone sideways. I have a pretty high tolerance for beta stuff (read: I tend to get really mad and complain a lot), but after installing the final of ganymede, the taste of gunpowder was too fresh to try another build there.
Meanwhile, even though the draw of the Spring WebFlow as a solution to the in(s)anity of conversational state mismanagement has been exerting maybe a couple amps, the OSGi thing is starting to look like a fruit that is at least worth tasting. Especially if you consider the fact that one of the great things about focusing on the VSM is that if you want to use something just to get development to be more sane, you are not tied to the same mast when deployment comes up. That said, while reading about the advantages of OSGi, I came across some info about being able to control intermodule dependencies that looked very interesting (e.g. what Java packages should have supported). (On a related, but totally goofball tangential line here, looking at all this made me go back to thinking that perhaps it is time for a language that has CBD baked in: consider, OO w/out components is kind of a sham, because the ‘units‘ are really non-operational except perhaps on the domain side, but then to get things done, there are all kinds of amalgamations that are called for, none done the same way in different projects (or perhaps amongst developers) and of course no integrated constraint language.)
Now, as these appetizing morsels were starting to lure me in this direction, I did come across this thread which had an interesting outburst in the comments by a chap who had a visceral reaction solely because the OSGi direction was charted/commenced by Eclipse. (I had to check the name to make sure I hadn‘t made the comment, cause I so thoroughly agreed with him.) Later, a tepid, totally unconvincing defense of eclipse was offered as a counterbalance that actually made matters worse. (Again, to my taste, the Springsource guys could use a course in bombast.)
Some other good news: there is a maven archetype and also a plugin and someone has done over petstore.
My short term goal here is super simple: make a simple web project that uses OSGi modules, and then get to where I can change CSS, Java, facelets, and just refresh. I will do some screencasts when (/if) I get there. (BTW, I have the Zoom Personal Recorder I spent a few minutes today getting it setup as a microphone so we could use it in Skype and Screenflow. Worked fine, though the levels had to be jacked way up. It‘s crazy how good the quality is on skype now, too bad eBay owns it.
