automated osgi bundle development with netbeans 7.1

Question

I'm currently developing a maven osgi bundle using Netbeans 7.1. While its easy to create new maven osgi bundle project from netbeans, I've been struggling about how I would run it. Simply running it from netbeans gives me an error that tells me there is missing requirement (missing slf4j for example).

Then I tried a different way. I ran equinox in a terminal and then manually install my project jar to it. But then I must also resolve all the dependencies manually.

Is there any way to automatically download all the required dependencies from an OSGI bundle and install it to a running OSGI framework?

thanx before

Answer 1

AFAIK there's no automation for OSGi in Netbeans (though I may well be wrong). The support you may have seen in Eclipse is only for Eclipse plugins not vanilla OSGi.

Your best bet is to go for some integrating testing or launch via a maven goal, pax-exam or bndtools or even pax-runner will allow you to launch from IDE/maven.

However I don't know of anything that will automatically resolve all dependencies (transitive dependencies and implementations of APIs you depend on would be problematic)

Answer 2

Its a big pain, no question about it. What I used to do was to do a full build (and if you've configured your manifests correctly should include all necessary dependencies) which will generate the necessary jar. I then wired my Tomcat to pick up the jar from my target repository and configured it to hotswap automatically.

Its a matter of preference if you want to run your app server from within your netbeans but I preferred to execute a separate instance of tomcat outside of my IDE. It'll work either way tho.