Friday, December 09, 2011

Bndtools at the OSGi Alliance

The OSGi Alliance has been using bnd for a long time in the OSGi build. bnd is used by the ant build to create the bundles and execute the compliance tests as part of our continuous builds. It is also installed in Eclipse as an IDE plugin to provide IDE support for compilation classpath and test execution by OSGi members working in the Expert Groups.

Recently Bndtools development has been underway to create a better integration of bnd with the Eclipse IDE for bundle development. Bndtools 1.0 was just released and is available for installation into the Eclipse IDE as a replacement for bnd's Eclipse IDE support.

Since the OSGi Alliance has long used bnd, we already had the bnd infrastructure in place for our build. All that we needed to do to start using Bndtools was to update each project's .project file (using the Add Bndtools Project Nature menu item). This simple change then enabled Bndtools to manage the project within the Eclipse IDE. The OSGi Alliance will continue to use bnd in the ant build, but for our Eclipse IDE use we have moved to Bndtools.

Thanks to Neil Bartlett, Peter Kriens and the other bnd and Bndtools contributors for their hard work in making bnd and Bndtools the premier tooling for OSGi development.

No comments: