Applications using the Spring framework have always been able to run happily in GlassFish, be it v2 or v3. Now with GlassFish v3 approaching a final release, new opportunities are coming along. In a follow-up to last week's entry on managed OSGi bundles, GlassFish architect Jerome Dochez takes it a little further by implementing the GlassFish service using Spring beans and invoking it using a Java EE 6 webapp. All with no OSGi or Spring dependency whatsoever. This detailed example uses Spring's extender bundle whose role is to target the Spring container for the Spring-based service implementation, and (this is what seems to me like the most interesting part), a simple web application that can simply inject this service with a standard @Resource annotation. Of course, this is no customized version of GlassFish and the service lookup uses OSGi services and a standard Java EE annotations. No GlassFish/Spring/OSGi API required. Powerful, yet very simple.

In his recent interview on OSGi interview JavaPosse.com, Peter Kriens (OSGi Director of Technology) mentions GlassFish v3 as an example of extending a runtime without using any API specific to that runtime. It's great to hear Peter likes the work done by the GlassFish v3 team!