The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) Alliance is working to realize the vision of a "universal middleware" that will address issues such as application packaging, versioning, deployment, publication, and discovery.

In this article we'll examine the need for the kind of container model provided by the OSGi, outline the capabilities it would provide, and discuss its relationship to complementary technologies such as SOA, SCA, and Spring. Enterprise software is often composed of large amounts of complex interdependent logic that makes it hard to adapt readily to changes in requirements from the business. You can enable this kind of agility by following a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) pattern that refactors a system into application modules grouped by business functions that expose their public functionality as services (interfaces).