For those of you who are interested in using Vaadin together with OSGi, there are a few articles in the wiki that you may find interesting:
Deployment Options on GlassFish 3
Hello GlassFish 3
Creating a Modular Vaadin Application with OSGi
Please add any comments you may have directly to the article in question using the “Add Comment” link at the bottom of the page.
-Petter-
Nice work Petter! Really interesting and well written articles!
I agree with Teemu - good stuff! Well done.
Regards,
Charles
Maybe Vaadin components should be modularized in this fashion. Since anyway they are being packaged as a jar for distribution. Agreed that they don’t come and go like in the typical OSGi use case, but having a standardized mechanism for the plugin to manage them would be nice.
Nice to meet fellow
astronauts
. 
The same idea hit me while reading about OSGi the first time.
I used the component API as an extension point in a system long ago. I implemented a classloader for that one to allow it load UI components in-the-fly (this starts to sound familiar).
However, it was never very used feature in the system as the updating only the UI components without any other changes was rare and in real-life the full redeployment was easier.
But then again, sound like a standard comes handy when sharing components.