It seems Ray is working on OSGi support which is expected to be included in 6.2. I was wondering if Marketplace will be supporting OSGi plugins.

In short yes., not yet!

First off, I cannot speak on behalf of our Product Management team or Marketplace strategy since I'm not a decision maker in those areas.

However, allow me to clarify the goals and assumptions we are working with during development of OSGi integration.

We want (all) Liferay plugins to work (unmodified) when deployed into Liferay's module framework (our integrated osgi framework).

By virtue of that, marketplace plugins should work as well.

However, it's doubtful that we will support (at first) pure OSGi bundles as marketplace artifacts until our teams are fully equipped to deal with those (we need to go through educating our support and engineering teams at least on the high level principles of OSGi design and architecture if we want to be able do that).

Meanwhile, you will surely be able to do your own pure OSGi plugin development if you choose.

Finally, once our module framework integration is part of the product and supports the above assumptions, getting to a point where we could support pure OSGi bundles in the marketplace doesn't require any more architectural changes in the product and could technically be introduced at any time.

Increasing the productivity and reducing the complexity of maintaining Liferay is a key motivator for me personally in moving to an OSGi based plugin model. Currently we have a proprietary knowledge pool with respect to the architecture and lifecycle of Liferay plugins. Moving to OSGi takes this from a proprietary design to an industry standard one which extends that knowledge pool from the handful of Liferay community folk to the entirety of Java developers who already understand OSGi (which is far greater and will continue to increase exponentially over time, 90% of the app severs Liferay runs in are already OSGi based), which would be very good for Liferay.

So to make a long story short, demand will ultimately decide. The more noise there is about Liferay, Marketplace and OSGi, the more likely it will happen sooner than later.

Just to make sure, it's an Eclipse Equinox integration, right?

It is Equinox by default (at the moment).

However, we're using the OSGi "Framework" API which means we're initializing the OSGi implementation in an agnostic fashion for any implementation which supports the spec.

Currently, I believe as far as open source OSGi implementations go, Equinox, Felix, and Knopflerfish all support that. So pick your pleasure.

We're using OSGi 4.3 APIs. So that changes the list to Equinox and Felix. Knopflerfish hasn't released an 4.3 compatible release yet, but when it does it should also work.

For interests sake, I changed the build to use felix in place of equinox and provided the correct dependencies are in place, it works fine.

What I may do is add this option to the build.properties.

That will be great!

I have to make another correction.

Felix is not working as it should currently in my tests. We'll try to make it work however.