Daniel (when will he finally have a blog?) posts an interesting RT on cocoon-dev, after having investigated OSGi and the good things it could bring to refactor Cocoon as a set of plugins.

OSGi has been running in my head for a long time as an interesting way to explore to finally attain the real-blocks Graal, even more since Eclipse used it in replacement of its proprietary kernel.

Classloader isolation, hot deployment/undeployment of remotly downloaded blocks, service lookup, security... what more do we need?

Tools? Well, let's just use Eclipse's PDE and we have a great tool to develop Cocoon blocks. Combine this with Lepido and we have a great framework with great tools to develop great apps :-)