How to setup bundle development environment (Eclipse Equinox Maven)

Question

I'am trying to setup eclipse environment to develop bundles (With maven-bundle-plugin-bnd) and run & debug that bundles equinox from eclipse

I created sample bundles with org.apache.felix maven-bundle-plugin and can install and start that bundles from eclipse equinox,
but every time i need to run "install file:C:\\path\\bundle1.jar","install file:C:\\path\\bundle2.jar" which causes pain. i searched for run configuration but it only intalls and starts (plugin) projects in workspace not maven projects.

What i have done is create maven project and add dependencies(bundle1,bundle2 etc..) and added maven-dependency-plugin to copy all depended bundles in one folder (another problem is equinox use "_" delimeter to determine version of bundles but maven uses "-" as delimeter) if i do not strip version in standalone equinox application i need to give version of bundle in config.ini file but i dont want that, is this proper way to solve this problem?

<plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>copy-dependencies</id>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <outputDirectory>${bundleDirectory}</outputDirectory>
              <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
              <overWriteSnapshots>true</overWriteSnapshots>
              <stripVersion>true</stripVersion>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>  

To sum up , i have bundles in folder, which is created with org.apache.felix maven-bundle-plugin , how can i run and debug them from eclipse?

Answer 1

I wouldn't say this is a "proper" solution, but it may work for you.

The antrun plugin can be used to modify the dependencies to replace the final hyphen with an underscore, so the dependency plugin doesn't need to strip the version.

My regex is rusty, but from a little testing the following configuration appears to apply the required name change to the files in the bundleDependency directory.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>copy-dependencies</id>
      <phase>package</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
      </goals>
      <configuration>
        <outputDirectory>${bundleDirectory}</outputDirectory>
        <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
        <overWriteSnapshots>true</overWriteSnapshots>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.3</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>package</phase>
      <configuration>
        <tasks>
          <!-- move within same directory is preferred method for a rename-->
          <move todir="${bundleDirectory}">
            <fileset dir="${bundleDirectory}"/>
            <mapper type="regexp" from="([a-zA-Z0-9\.-]+)(-)([0-9\.]+.jar)" 
              to="\1_\3"/>
          </move>
        </tasks>
      </configuration>
      <goals>
        <goal>run</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
  <dependencies>
   <dependency>
     <groupId>ant</groupId>
     <artifactId>ant-nodeps</artifactId>
     <version>1.6.5</version>
   </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</plugin>

Answer 2

I wrote a tool called auto-builder ( http://code.google.com/p/auto-builder ). It introspects PDE-based projects and generates Ant build files; it supports transitive closure over dependencies and all that jazz.

I posted a write-up: http://empty-set.net/?p=9 . I wrote it because the Maven tools I played with, when integrated with PDE, didn't “just work.” Basically, I wanted to do coding in PDE and have a Hudson-based CI without any fuss in between.

Generating Ant files is nice because it gives you all the benefits of a declarative build tool, but it leaves you with a procedural description of what it is doing.

I am looking for more PDE-based projects to test it on. There are a couple RFC-0112 Bundle repositories around, and I have some code for downloading dependencies. If anyone is interested, then I could integrate dependencies download with auto-builder.