Eclipse PDE: Redeploy bundle to running equinox osgi framework

Question

I have a quite complex equinox application that I start in Eclipse with a usual launch configuration. It takes about 2 minutes to start so I don't want to restart it each time I make some minor code changes during development.

Is there some way to redeploy a single Eclipse plug-in to the launched framework? Actually it should be quite easy given the modular structure of osgi and the separated class loaders to install some function like this. I found the org.eclipse.ui.tools package in the eclipse platform incubator which seems to have a dynamic bundle install/uninstall but don't know how to use it with my own launch config.

Any ideas about how to resolve this? Does it work with JRebel and are there alternatives? Thank you, Stefan

Answer 1

Depends a lot on how you want to perform this deployment. The simplest method would be to start your application with the option "-console" and use the OSGi console to make any install / update / refresh that you need. But again, I don't know if in your case this can be a viable option.