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javaosgiosgi-bundleapache-felixbndtools
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Reputation: 11

is bndtools a future bundle tools for OSGI bundle?

I saw there are some community osgi.enroute, equinox and etc are encouraging bndtools for osgi bundle. However, there are a lot of a special key that I have never seen and can't find in their official website. For e.g.

Require-Capability:\
    osgi.service;filter:="blahblahblah";effective:=active
Provide-Capability: osgi.service;objectClass=net....

And there are sometimes doing like

META-Persistence:
Webcontext-path:

Ok, where is this documentation from? Who the hell know if putting like this it will auto look up? Which mean I put JDBC-Driver then it will lookup?

Are they any bndtool cheat sheet or docs that can refer all this stuff.

As I know maven felix plugin had helped us to bundle nicely private export and import. What for I want to migrate to bndtools?

And I see apache karaf(popular OSGI runtime) is still using felix maven plugin which is more clear and understandable.

Is this a reason why OSGI until now still less popular than other JAVA framework? Can I still stick to the maven Felix plugin bundle rather than using these complicated tools?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 429

Answers (1)

Christian Schneider
Christian Schneider

Reputation: 19626

The newest enroute examples use a maven build. So they are not very different from apache karaf builds. For creating bundles with maven you have two choices. The maven-bundle-plugin (from felix) and the bnd-maven-plugin from the bnd community.

Both use bnd under the hood, so they only have small differences. bnd-maven-plugin uses bnd.bnd by default for configuration. maven-bundle-plugin can also use this configuration style. I see the trend that many project use bnd-maven-plugin as it is more up to date with bnd versions but you can use both.

The real differences are with building the deployment artifact. In bndtools you build a jar out of a bndrun file while in karaf you usually create a feature file. This is where you really have to decide which way you go. If you use a self contained jar for your application then bndtools is a great choice. If you plan to deploy into karaf then karaf features are the best choice.

Btw. In both cases bndtools plugin for eclipse provides some nice support. Especially looking into the Manifest of jars and editing support for bnd.bnd files is nicely supported.

Regarding configurations needed in the bnd.bnd file. These configurations are needed in the same way if you use the felix maven-bundle-plugin.

The good news is that if you use the newest specs / examples then you rarely have to touch the bnd.bnd or the plugin config in maven. There are annotations for almost every needed configuration. There is good documentation inside the OSGi specs themself but the easiest approach is starting with examples.

Upvotes: 0

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