A future release of Spring Dynamic Modules may offer the following additional guarantee with respect to application context creation and start levels:

Application context creation happens asynchronously. However, the extender bundle does guarantee that the creation of all application contexts for bundles at start level n will be complete before the creation of any application context at start level m, where m > n. Care must therefore be taken not to introduce any mandatory dependencies on services exported by bundles with higher start levels or a deadlock will be introduced.

In a similar vein, when shutting down the extender bundle, application contexts at start level m will be shut down before application contexts at start level n, where m > n.

While support for generic and Spring-MVC web applications is available in 1.1.0, in the future we'd like to provide integration (if needed) with other popular web libraries (such as JSF and Spring Web Flow) in the upcoming releases.

Care needs to be taken when using JPA or Hibernate under OSGi as the persistence engines must have visibility of the persistent types and mapping files. The Spring Dynamic Modules project will be investigating an extension model to make managing this easier when persistent configuration is split across several bundles. See Peter Krien's blog entry on the topic for an insight into the issues.

Also, the project aims to simplify deployment of JDBC drivers and pooling libraries that at the moment require special DynamicImport-Package.