Who calls start() on the Bundle-Activator class in Eclipse?

Question

My ultimate goal is Invoking Eclipse plugin from Java . I see that an Eclipse plugin registers a class as Bundle-Activator in MANIFEST.MF . The start(BundleContext context) method will be called on this class. Where does this call come from?

Eclipse is made up of many repos that are mostly mirrored on GitHub. Some are deprecated and point to other repos. And it's a programming IDE and an OSGi framework at the same time? I find it hard to find the code for this core part of the framework that handles plugin loading. Where is it?

Answer 1

The project to interact with OSGi bundles is Eclipse Equinox. It is an implementation of the OSGi framework. You start equinox and load the bundle jar from there instead of putting them into the regular classpath.

Here you find some information how to do this in general: http://njbartlett.github.io/2011/07/03/embedding-osgi.html

You can then interact with the bundles from you plain java application. This is not an easy thing though.

What makes things even more complex is that Eclipse is not plain OSGi. Eclipse predates OSGi and many of the concepts are still not fully adapted to plain OSGi. So using eclipse plugins from a plain java application may be very hard.

I recommend to ask on the mailing list of the plugin you want to use if there is experience with using it outside eclipse.