I develop an Eclipse RCP application which makes heavy use of OSGi bundles which provide services for later use. The use case requires the bundles to register their services (e.g. import filters) to be used later on in different situations. The OSGi bundles are build with maven-bundle-plugin.
How can I tell Equinox to start the OSGi bundles automatically? The normal approach via Activator is not working. Only the lazy mode is working, but I can not touch classes within unknown bundles. I read the OSGi specification and the opposite to lazy load, eager load, is not provided. Is there another chance to mark the bundle for an auto load?
Within Eclipse I have a chance to set Auto-Start to true, but what do I do within a distribution build by Maven and Tycho?
Declarative services are not working due to the issue of a not loaded org.eclipse.equinox.ds. Can I get it started somehow instead of an Activator? This would be a solution, too, but I do not know how to build the distribution or what to set as configuration.
What are best practices here? Are there any other possibilities? The documentation on OSGi bundles on Eclipse platform is a little thin.
You were on the right track with declarative services. Registering your services manually is a lot like hard work, and looking them up safely can be even more work, and tricky to get right. Another standard in this area to be aware of is Blueprint, although I certainly don’t suggest you rewrite anything if you have DS metadata in place. Blueprint has slightly nicer characteristics in a very dynamic environment, and a richer configuration. (I’m a committer on one of the Blueprint implementations, Apache Aries.) With both Blueprint and DS the important thing is that something else is managing your services for you.
This leaves us back with the issue of why your bundles aren’t being started. I think there must be a clue in the fact that they do start in Felix. Have you fired up an equinox console and confirmed all your bundles are installed and resolved? (‘ss’ to list bundles.)
Have you had a look in the config.ini file and confirmed your bundles are listed, and with an appropriate start level – or are you using the Equinox auto-start-everything else bundle?