Re: OSGi bundles as dependencies

Craig Ching <craigchinggmail.com> writes:

> I am looking for a more practical, though obviously
less than ideal,
> solution to my problem, e.g. possibly a cookbook
example or even
> just a nudge in the right direction

Maybe I misunderstood your question. If you have an OSGi
bundle
packaged as a JAR that you'd like to depend on, you can
specify its
Maven coordinates as follows. Let's take the Felix project's
OBR
bundle as an example. First, we'll separate its version
specification
in the dependencyManagement section of the project's root
POM:

  <properties>
   
<felix.version>0.9.0-incubator-SNAPSHOT</felix.vers
ion>
    <!-- ... -->
  </properties>

  <dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
       
<artifactId>org.apache.felix.bundlerepository</arti
factId>
        <version>${felix.version}</version>
      </dependency>
      <!-- ... -->
    </dependencies>
  </dependencyManagement>
    
Then, in one of our own bundles that relies upon the Felix
OBR bundle,
we refer to it like this from a module-level POM:

  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
     
<artifactId>org.apache.felix.bundlerepository</arti
factId>
      <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <!-- ... -->
  </dependencies>
    
That allows the code in /our/ bundle (or any other Java
artifact)
under development to refer to the classes in the Felix OBR
bundle at
compile-time.

> (e.g. I did see someone post a vague reference to using
the
> maven-dependency-plugin and maybe some ant plugin to
unzip the
> dependency, but it was a bit hard to follow how that
was all put
> together or even if that was the right first-step to
pursue).

Now here I wonder if you're asking about how to build a
bundle
yourself, or possibly how to extract some classes from
another
bundle's JAR and have them packaged into your own artifact.
If so,
those operations are taken care of by declaring your
artifact to be of
packaging type "bundle":

  <packaging>bundle</packaging>

and configuring the maven-bundle-plugin¹:

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
       
<artifactId>maven-bundle-plugin</artifactId>
        <extensions>true</extensions>
        <configuration>
          <instructions>
          <!-- Export-Package, Private-Package, ...
-->
          </instructions>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

> I would absolutely love to see first-class support for
OSGi bundle
> dependencies, possibly even a BIRT maven plugin would
help
> immensely, but I'd assumed nothing like that was
available when my
> google searches didn't turn up much information 

There is some ongoing work in the other direction: tying the
OSGi
Bundle Repository together with Maven's repository, so the
one could
use OBR to install bundles that reside in a Maven
repository. Perhaps
if you could clarify what you'd like to achieve, we could
point you
toward existing solutions or at least some work underway.


Footnotes: 
¹ http://cwiki.apache.org/FELIX/bundle-plugin-for-ma
ven-bnd.html
    which sits atop
  http://www.aqute.biz/Co
de/Bnd

-- 
Steven E. Harris


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