Enterprise OSGi is complex, but the potential value is enormous, especially when the OSGi standards can be extended to cloud-based architectures. More on this later.

In the meantime, building OSGi applications is a challenge, as it is all about managing *and isolating* dependencies. Enter bndtools, an Eclipse plug-in designed to make developing and testing OSGi components (bundles) easy.

The tutorial for bndtools can be found here, which I recently completed:

http://bndtools.org/tutorial.html

It is quite short, and gets you up and going very quickly with an OSGi application.

Now that I’ve got the basics of bndtools sorted, I’m going to go back to see if I can rebuild my “Enterprise OSGi in Action” project using it, so I can stop using my rather poor shell scripts..that should make it much easier/quicker to get through the remaining sections of the book, in terms of the code/build/test cycle.

The bndtools makes use of a remote repository which includes packages needs to build OSGi applications..I need to understand more about this, so I can figure out how and where various packages and bundles needed to build and run OSGi applications should come from, and how to manage changes to these over time. The ‘Enterprise OSGi in Action’ project leans heavily on the Apache Aries Blog Assembley set of components, which is great to get things going, but in practice, many of the components in the Apache Aries distribution are not needed to do the examples in the book. 

Since I don’t like waste (it leads to unnecessary complexity down the road..), I want to see if I can build the examples with only the specific components needed.