[whartung]

The feature and bug of the OSGI experience is its rather coarse granularity. It’s finer grained than, say, a WAR, but obviously much different than something akin to the Smalltalk or, to a lesser extent, Common Lisp.

That said, make no mistake, an OSGI module can easily fall into that sweet spot of compiling and reloading fast enough to fall within the cognitive loop of effectively being “instant”.

And if you organize your code well, other parts of the overall app are (mostly) unaware something has changed. Java can be quite dynamic but has not formalized things like dynamic class change lifecycle. OSGI does expose that, and lets the rest of the code tap into that so it can handle change more robustly.

[pjmlp]

Another alternative is to use JVM plugins like JRebel.