The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) Alliance is a worldwide consortium of ICT companies and research organizations that advances a process to assure interoperability of applications and services based on its component integration platform OSGi.
OSGi technology is universal middleware that provides a service-oriented, component-based environment for developers and offers standardized ways to manage the software life cycle. The OSGi specifications define a service oriented architecture (SOA) for networked systems. This architecture significantly reduces the overall complexity of building, maintaining and deploying applications.
http://www.osgi.org/