Get it? Because it’s a pun, and it’s about pluggable modules, and … erm. Anyway, whereas once long ago there was debate over how exactly the OSGi frameworks would end up implemented in the Java language, that debate is more or less settled, and now the benefits are being quietly reaped. One of the bigger bits of OSGi-related news in the past few months is the new support in NetBeans, announced last month. Of course, OSGi has been supported in Eclipse for some time with that IDE’s Equinox module — long enough that Addison-Wesley now has a book on the subject.OSGi developer interest is still going strong, with a first ever London dev conference last month. And if you’d like to get up to speed on OSGi yourself, JavaWorld has an excellent introductory series on the subject. UPDATE: Oh, and whaddya know, just after I post IBM announces OSGi integration into one of its WebSphere app server offerings!Oh, and, hey! In unrelated news, sometimes the people you blog about read your blog and leave nice and informative comments! After I put up my post yesterday about whether features of the Da Vinci Machine would end up in the newly merged HotSpot-JRockit creation, Mark Reinhold was kind enough to stop by and say this: The Da Vinci Machine is a Project in which various ideas for the better support of non-Java languages on the JVM are being explored and prototyped. It’s not a separate VM. It’s not even a copy of the HotSpot VM, but rather a set of patches against it. It’s being developed by some of the very same engineers who work on HotSpot. I expect that some features from the Da Vinci Project will wind up in the SE Platform, and hence in all Java VMs, over time. The most prominent of these is JSR 292, a.k.a. “InvokeDynamic”, which is already in JDK 7 (the product) and will be proposed for inclusion in Java SE 7 (the platform). Other features are at an earlier stage of development and require further work.So there you go — it sounds like the Da Vinci innovations will be percolating out to all JVMs via the Java standard rather than being custom-picked for Oracle’s creation. Good for all of us! Software Development