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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T18:32:08+00:00

I’m using OSGi for my latest project at work, and it’s pretty beautiful as

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I’m using OSGi for my latest project at work, and it’s pretty beautiful as far as modularity and functionality.

But I’m not happy with the development workflow. Eventually, I plan to have 30-50 separate bundles, arranged in a dependency graph – supposedly, this is what OSGi is designed for. But I can’t figure out a clean way to manage dependencies at compile time.

Example: You have bundles A and B. B depends on packages defined in A. Each bundle is developed as a separate Java project.

In order to compile B, A has to be on the javac classpath.

Do you:

  1. Reference the file system location of project A in B’s build script?
  2. Build A and throw the jar into B’s lib directory?
  3. Rely on Eclipse’s “referenced projects” feature and always use Eclipse’s classpath to build (ugh)
  4. Use a common “lib” directory for all projects and dump the bundle jars there after compilation?
  5. Set up a bundle repository, parse the manifest from the build script and pull down the required bundles from the repository?

No. 5 sounds the cleanest, but also like a lot of overhead.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Basically, you can use:

    • source dependency (with Eclipse’s “referenced projects”)
    • binary dependency (using the jar of bundle A)

    But since binary dependency is much cleaner, it is also the kind of dependency best managed by a release management framework like maven.
    And you can integrate maven in your Eclipse project through m2eclipse.

    The Maven plugin to use would then be: maven-bundle-plugin, that you can see in action in:

    Consider this more real-world example using Felix’ Log Service implementation.
    The Log Service project is comprised of a single package: org.apache.felix.log.impl.
    It has a dependency on the core OSGi interfaces as well as a dependency on the compendium OSGi interfaces for the specific log service interfaces. The following is its POM file:

    <project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
  <artifactId>org.apache.felix.log</artifactId>
  <packaging>bundle</packaging>
  <name>Apache Felix Log Service</name>
  <version>0.8.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <description>
    This bundle provides an implementation of the OSGi R4 Log service.
  </description>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>${pom.groupId}</groupId>
      <artifactId>org.osgi.core</artifactId>
      <version>0.8.0-incubator</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>${pom.groupId}</groupId>
      <artifactId>org.osgi.compendium</artifactId>
      <version>0.9.0-incubator-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-bundle-plugin</artifactId>
        <extensions>true</extensions>
        <configuration>
          <instructions>
            <Export-Package>org.osgi.service.log</Export-Package>
            <Private-Package>org.apache.felix.log.impl</Private-Package>
            <Bundle-SymbolicName>${pom.artifactId}</Bundle-SymbolicName>
            <Bundle-Activator>${pom.artifactId}.impl.Activator</Bundle-Activator>
            <Export-Service>org.osgi.service.log.LogService,org.osgi.service.log.LogReaderService</Export-Service>
          </instructions>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>
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