Has anyone found OSGi to be useful in corporate applications?

Question

The title says it all; has anyone deployed a corporate application in OSGi and found it useful?

I can see the benefits, forced modularity, good dependency definitions etc. But these seem to be mainly build related improvements.

Has anyone found it useful to dynamically replace an existing module? We tend to split our application by process and to be honest, it's not that difficult to startup a new instance of the app with updated libraries. Would OSGi be useful for this?

How reliable is the replacing of a module? It strikes me that if you have a very busy process with lots going on, replacing a running module is fraught with danger.

Answer 1

Most of our applications are web applications.

We have one OSGi thick client that gathers biometric information. Photographs and fingerprints through fingerprint card scanning, currently.

The advantage of OSGi to us is that we can update the plug-ins from a central web site, rather than using an uninstall / install process. Our thick client will be in over 100 locations throughout the United States, so this was important to us.