Hi, I'm working on migrating an existing swing application (http://cytoscape.org) to OSGi using Felix. With the help of bnd, I've gotten everything running about how it should, with the exception of our legacy plugin mechanism. The way the old plugin mechanism works is that a plugin jar file (but not a bundle) is read and we then call ClassLoader.loadClass() on a class found in the jar file. The problem is that with Felix I get a NoClassDefFoundError when I try to load the class. I'm assuming this is because none of the packages defined in the plugin jar are found by Felix since the plugin jars aren't bundles or loaded as such.
Now, I've managed to work around this problem in two cases. First is using Equinox, which I'm not terribly keen on using. Second is by running bnd on each plugin jar, loading them as bundles, jumping through a few hoops to get the correct ClassLoader, and then loading the class. The problem with the second approach is that I have to wrap all plugins before anything will work. I'd very much like to avoid this requirement (for now) because this will only work with plugins that I have and not those developed by users. Can anyone provide any guidance on loading classes that aren't part of bundles? Is this possible with Felix? I apologize if this is a bit vague, but I'm still very new to OSGi. thanks, Mike -- ____________________________________________________________ Michael Smoot, Ph.D. Bioengineering Department tel: 858-822-4756 University of California San Diego
