[hibernate-dev] Require OSGi 4.3 for ORM?

[Brett Meyer]

During initial discussions about ORM in OSGi [1], we had targeted OSGi 4.2.  However, in order to completely handle bundle scanning [2], we need an API that was not introduced until OSGi 4.3 (BundleWiring).  There's nothing like it in 4.2 and it's not easily/reliably replaced.  Although I believe 4.2 is still used in the community, most containers/runtimes (including JBoss OSGi) now support 4.3 and (very soon) 5.0.

We're obviously not interested in branching hibernate-osgi to support multiple OSGi versions.  Although 4.2 is still used, should we require 4.3?  Without the ability to exhaustively and reliably scan the bundles for resources, our capabilities are limited anyway.  Further, if a user still requires 4.2, they can always wrap Hibernate as an OSGi bundle in any of the legacy methods.

[1] https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-7527
[2] https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-7993

Brett Meyer
Red Hat Software Engineer, Hibernate