Looks like Sun has hired Richard S. Hall, known for his work on the Apache Felix OSGi container. Richard will be working on the Glassfish application server and helping them to further leverage OSGi. Very interesting to see how many of the application servers are dependent on OSGi these days (Weblogic, Websphere, Spring App Server, etc).

In terms of JSR 277, the Java Modularity work for Java 7, there has been a long-running tension between Sun and the OSGi proponents on the expert group. For quite a while now, Sun has been trying to patch up these relations both publicly and privately. Mandy Chung has been writing about the OSGi implementation prototype for JSR 277. Along these lines, I think it’s great to see an OSGi expert in-house at Sun who can provide expertise.

Tip of the hat to Neil Bartlett on Twitter (@njbartlett) for this news!