BundleException while trying to start an osgi bundle

Question

I'm trying to install & start a bundle from a osgi jar in the filesystem

Bundle bundle = context.installBundle("reference:file:" + fullPath);
bundle.start();

it worked for another simple bundle, but another more complex bundle has

Require-Capability: osgi.ee;filter:="(&(osgi.ee=JavaSE)(version=1.8))"

in its manifest

this causes the following exception

(org.osgi.framework.BundleException) org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle
Unable to resolve 42.0: missing requirement [42.0] osgi.ee; (&(osgi.ee=JavaSE)(version=1.8))

how do I add this capability to my project? also how would I remove this require from the other project?

all similiar questions I found didn't answer my question

thanks in advance for any answers and for helping me not pull out my hair :)

Edit:

as christian suggested I tried finding the configuration to felix in netbeans, as the felix framework is loaded by netbeans. I found some configurations inside the maven POM file, but could not use the "org.osgi.framework.system.capabilities" framework property which was mentioned by christian, which I couldn't find in the documentation. I am putting a bounty as this is really important for me to resolve and is the only thing preventing me from using OSGi as far as I can see

Answer 1

The capability you identified:

Require-Capability: osgi.ee;filter:="(&(osgi.ee=JavaSE)(version=1.8))"

is a requirement for the osgi.ee namespace. This is the namespace which defines the execution environment for your framework. The filter then says that you need the execution environment to be JavaSE, and that you need the version attribute to be 1.8. This (unsurprisingly) corresponds to Java SE 8.

As others have indicated, this capability should be provided by the OSGi framework. You should not need to do anything to get this to happen. There are two main reasons that this capability would not be present.

1. You are using an older, or non SE, version of Java. This could easily happen if your NetBeans launch configuration is not using a Java 8 installation.

2. You are using a Felix framework which does not understand "new" versions of Java. This could be because your Felix framework is old (the latest version is 5.6.4) or because your Java version is very new (are you using a pre-release Java 9 build?).

This really should just work if you can run a newish Felix framework on top of Java 8. Do you have any more details about your environment?

Edit:

You can see the osgi.ee capability provided by the system bundle as follows:

// Get the wiring for the system bundle
BundleWiring wiring = context.getBundle(0).adapt(BundleWiring.class);

// Get the osgi.ee capability for the system bundle
List<Capability> eecaps = wiring.getCapabilities("osgi.ee");

// There must be exactly one capability to show
System.out.println(eecaps.get(0).getAttributes());

Answer 2

This is a known felix bug which has been fixed in 2.0.4. From http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/felix/releases/org.apache.felix.bundlerepository-2.0.10/doc/changelog.txt ,

Changes from 2.0.2 to 2.0.4
---------------------------
** Bug
* [FELIX-3097] - LocalRepository is not updated when bundles are
* [FELIX-4571] - NullPointerException when using Repository impl with Aries subsystem impl
* [FELIX-4616] - BundleRepository ResourceComparator violates comparison contract
* [FELIX-4640] - missing (&(osgi.ee=JavaSE)(version=1.8)) when embedding in org.apache.felix.framework

** Improvement
* [FELIX-4812] - BundleRepository can be quite CPU intensive when starting a lot of bundles

Answer 3

This is a capability that needs to be provided by your framework. It means that your project needs to run on Java 8.

It is configured in the framework property:

org.osgi.framework.system.capabilities=osgi.ee; osgi.ee="JavaSE"; version:List<Version>="1.0,1.1,1.2,1.3,1.4,1.5,1.6,1.7,1.8"

That said normally this is already configured when you for example start the felix distro.