SAP’s vision towards Equinox

SAP has previously stated that their next generation of NetWeaver was going to be based on OSGi.  Fredrik Alstroemer from SAP Java Server developer team has written about their reasoning and in particular SAP’s choise of using Equinox as their OSGi runtime.  Some key takeaways:

– SAP Netweaver already has a modular architecture but the time is right to move to OSGi which is more or less a de facto industry standard for modularization.

– Equinox was chosen due to Eclipse’s ability to handle large number of bundles.  Equinox also appears to have a linear performance with respect to the number of bundles…

SAP is already a contributor to the Eclipse community, via their participation in WTP and the Memory Analyzer project. According to Frank, it seems they want to participate even more, especially with respect to Equinox…

“..be an intricate part on the road towards making Equinox an even bigger player on the Java server market, by investing into areas such as even higher bundle counts, and scoping.”

and

“One not so obvious area though, is the investigation into provisioning solutions, where we’re excited to look closer into the OSGi Bundle Repository and joining forces with Equinox p2.”

I also really appreciates Fredrik’s very practical outlook on Equinox and their usage:

Does all this mean Equinox is ‘enterprise ready’? Well, no, and it shouldn’t, really. But will we, with Equinox, be able to build an enterprise ready solution with all the benefits a truly modularized environment can offer? I think so.

I agree, Equinox is one part of the solution, depending on the application other services are required to complete the solution.  The nice thing though is that Equinox’s modular architecture makes it possible for SAP to create a solution for their customers; reminds me of Redmonk’s Stackless Stack.