For your information.

This White Paper

gives a nice overview of the OSGi specifications (which has at least three
open source implementations) for "service oriented architecture" of
large-scale software systems.

I see a lot of potential in OSGi to "glue together" the kind of large scale
controller systems (including remote access, deployment and hotplugging
update of software) via this OSGi approach. It's Java based, which is not a
problem for the non-realtime aspects of our controllers. There is _a lot_
of critical mass behind it (including the mobile phone and automative
industries, and also the Eclipse IDE uses and supports it) which makes it
much more realistic than a, say, CORBA-based development. It can to a large
extent be compared to what .NET wants to be, but OSGi has no
single-platform lock-in.

Herman Bruyninckx