Jigsaw Explaination

InfoQ has a good write up on Project Jigsaw. They, essentially, just repeat most of what was in the java posse interview. However, they do a good job of pulling it together.

Aside from binding the packaged application more to the platform on which it is to run than does OSGi, the dependency models in the two systems are different. Sun needed to be able to split packages into different modules and have them loaded into the same classloader at runtime – so for example a package like java.util might be split into different modules (or even different implementations for memory constrained devices). To support this Jigsaw has a concept of a local dependency which is recursive. So if module ‘Swing’ has a local dependency on module ‘AWT’ and module ‘AWT’ has a local dependency on module ‘base’, then at runtime modules Swing, AWT and base will all end up in the same classloader. Although OSGi has a similar concept in the form of fragments, these are much less flexible in that they cannot themselves express dependencies.

link: InfoQ: Jigsaw Falling Into Place