OSGI runtime inside traditional J2EE server

Question

I understand it should probably be other way round (OSGI runtime hosting J2EE servers), as it is apparently already possible with glassfish.

However, our clients have extensive experience in administering traditional J2EE servers and significant investment (licenses, training etc.) Our architecture would benefit from OSGI modular architecture, but I can not ask our clients to switch from J2EE servers to OSGI runtimes.

Is there a way to install OSGI runtime as war or ear inside traditional J2EE servers, even if they will use no container-managed resources (for example thread or connection pools) nor other J2EE features like JNDI, EJB etc?

Our applications use technologies like Hibernate, Spring etc.

Answer 1

You might want to look at the bridge servlet solution from equinox:

http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/server/http_in_container.php

They have a special servlet (bridge servlet) that spawns an OSGi runtime, adds an OSGi HTTP service, and proxies traffic to the HTTP service (and ultimately to your servlets that register themselves to the HTTP service).