Dependency Manager - History

Dependency Manager has quite a long history, that starts over ten years ago.

The early years¶

The first version of the Dependency Manager was created when Marcel started working on his first commercial OSGi project back in 2002. At that time, the OSGi specification was still at R2, and the only solution for managing dependencies was "service binder" which did not support the dynamics we needed at that time. Therefore, dependency manager was created, based on a fluent, declarative Java API.

In 2005, after writing a white paper, dependency manager was presented at the OSGi DevCon in Paris. At that time, the project had been open sourced, but not yet at Apache. When the Oscar project finally decided to move to the incubator, where it became Felix, Dependency Manager was one of the subprojects that joined.

Life at Apache¶

The move to Apache definitely gave the project a lot more visibility and, besides a larger user base, also attracted a few very talented developers. Xander did a lot of work in getting some of the higher level design patterns implemented, and Pierre added support for annotations and ensured that the code ran well on really big, multi-core systems.

In 2014, after many discussions about new features and improvements we would like to add, we started experimenting with a completely new codebase, redesigning some aspects from the ground up based on all the knowledge and experience that we had gained over the years. About a year later, that lead to the release of Dependency Manager 4.