Hello, I am complete novice in OSGi and I am stuck trying to find the best solution to the following problem (which I think should be fairly typical):
We have a large desktop application which we are trying to break into OSGi bundles. The application uses quite a few third party libraries. We want to make those libraries available to every bundle. But it does not seem to be that easy. I tried several approaches and I am satisfied with none :( I know about properties: FRAMEWORK_SYSTEMPACKAGES and FRAMEWORK_BOOTDELEGATION. So I set FRAMEWORK_BOOTDELEGATION to "*" and I DO NOT set FRAMEWORK_SYSTEMPACKAGES to anything. What I discovered is that in this case if package which comes from libraries on a classpath IS present in Import-Package in bundle's manifest then this bundle won't be resolved (error). But if the package IS NOT present in Import-Package (or is marked with resolution=optional) then the bundle will be resolved (naturally). But in the second case I can use the classes from this package from inside the bundle! So I don't have package in Import-Package, but I can use classes from this package! But when I have package in Import-Package I can't use classes (the bundle is not even resolved)! It seems to me there is inconsistency here between bundle resolution process and classloading. Yes, I know that if I use FRAMEWORK_SYSTEMPACKAGES property and put all my third-party packages into it the bundle resolution will work just fine. So as far as I understand there are 3 ways to make third libraries available to all my bundles: 1. put all the packages from those libraries into FRAMEWORK_SYSTEMPACKAGES property and set FRAMEWORK_BOOTDELEGATION to "*" 2. put all the libraries (jars) into a separate bundle 3. set FRAMEWORK_BOOTDELEGATION to "*" and remove packages of those third-party jars from Import-Package entry from all bundle's manifests (or mark them with resolution=optional) I don't like the first case because I need to extract package names from all those third-party jars at build time and somehow pass this information to my java code which starts felix so that I can put it into FRAMEWORK_SYSTEMPACKAGES property. I don't like the second case because I end up with one huge bundle which contains all the third-party libraries. I don't like it for several reasons, one being load time and another pure aesthetics. I don't like the third case because that is not how it is supposed to be used and basically is a hack. Am I missing anything? What is the "official" way of achieving it? Thank you! -- Dmitry Skavish
