Steven,
I am not really sure I understand the issue as you describe it. The
bundle repository does not depend on the Felix shell in any way. There
is a shell command created so that we can have a simple shell-based UI,
but that is that.
The API for OBR is defined by the org.osgi.service.obr package, which
was defined at http://bundles.osgi.org/rfc-0112_BundleRepository.pdf,
but this link appears to be broken now. Peter?
As for the _deploy() method, it is just using the defined API from the
above package to provide a shell-based UI. All it does is parse the
command line, get an OBR resolver, add the bundles specified from the
parsed command line to the resolver, call resolve to resolve any
dependencies, then call deploy if the dependencies are resolved.
Most of the code is just printing status information to stdout.
So, that is basically the standard algorithm for using the OBR API:
1. Get a resolver.
2. Add desired resources to the resolver (discovered through the
repository admin interface).
3. Resolve the resolver's set of resources.
4. Deploy if successfully resolved, print error message if not.
This approach is also used to create a GUI front-end for OBR (which
hasn't been committed due to lack of time); the OBR GUI doesn't have
anything at all to do with the shell.
What else specifically do you need? Besides documentation... :-)
-> richard
Steven E. Harris wrote:
First off, I need to thank the Felix developers for a great
product. I've been able to integrate the Felix OSGi framework into my
project with just a few days of study and experimentation.
A difficult requirement in my project involves discovery and
resolution of plugin dependencies. The client application needs to be
able to download a plugin (an OSGi bundle), and then figure out which
other plugins it must download and install before using the first
plugin. Unlike Eclipse, we'd like to rely on the Import-Package and
Export-Package header rather than the more explicit but less flexible
Require-Bundle.
The bundlerepository bundle contains all the code to do this
dependency discovery, but it's wrapped up and tangled in with the
Felix shell. I spent a long time studying
org.apache.felix.bundlerepository.ObrCommandImpl
before I realized that much of the _deploy() method is using
interfaces from the org.osgi.service.obr package. That suggests that
there's supposed to be some available programmatic means to do what
the OBR-related commands offer in the shell.
Next I found the class
org.apache.felix.mosgi.managedelements.obrprobe.ObrProbe
which implements the ObrProbeMBean interface's deploy() method. This
implementation looks slimmed down from ObrCommandImpl's _deploy()
method; I haven't yet figured out the difference between the two,
beyond using LDAP-style filters in the former.
Beyond using liberal cut-and-paste, is there some prescribed way for
an application embedding Felix to incorporate this kind of
deploy()/_deploy() capability? Searching the Web repeatedly for
discussion on this topic has only led me back to reading the source
code.
Follow-up question: Couldn't most of the bundlerepository bundle be
teased apart from depending on the shell?
