I noticed some posts here on tooling to support bundle development. I thought I would take the opportunity to point out that Eclipse has a comprehensive suite of support for bundle development in the form of a Plugin Development Environment (PDE). Historically we call them plugins but if you do the mental text replacement of "plugin" -> "bundle" in the UI then it becomes a Bundle Development Environment :-) Eclipse plugins == OSGi bundles. The online help details the use of PDE but the key attributes of PDE in this context are:
- Automatic computation and management of the dynamic classpaths dictated by bundle dependency statements. For example, when developing a bundle you only get to see the classes you are supposed to see based on your stated dependency information. - "In-place" launching and debugging without building or deploying - Manifest checking and validation - Wizards for bundle creation - High-level bundle editors - Offline build based on dependencies in the manifests - ... lots more ... A couple of things to note: - As was pointed out in some other posts, Eclipse has a convention of using one project per bundle. I would encourage you to take this into account in structuring your repository setup. Doing so allows the Eclipse user community to join in developing bundles at Felix. - Currently PDE can only launch the Eclipse OSGi implementation. It would be interesting to see someone in the Felix community contribute support for launching Felix. Note that this is really only an issue if you are developing Felix itself. If you are developing standard bundles, it doesn't matter which OSGi you test on. Jeff
