Question

My application supports running on many dbms and it requires user to configure dbms connection setting and also provide the jdbc jar file.
Now the application is to be packaged as OSGi bundle. There will be another main jar which lanches OSGi server and starts the application as bundle.
Can you please suggest how can I package the application as bundle and let user provide the jdbc jar file.

Will it require something like the main launcher jar specifying JDBC driver classes as FRAMEWORK_SYSTEMPACKAGES property?

Thanks in advance,
Aman

Answer 1

There are two ways of doing this:

1) Adding the driver.jar to the classpath of the main launcher and, like you say, expose its packages via the framework by specifying that property (or actually you can use the FRAMEWORK_SYSTEMPACKAGES_EXTRA property to just specify additional packages, instead of specifying all of them).

2) Manually wrapping the driver.jar as a bundle, or doing it dynamically at runtime. For example, you could try to wrap bundles that are copied to a certain folder (similar to what Apache Felix File Install does) by using Pax URL or some other tool that can create a bundle out of an ordinary jar file for you (see http://team.ops4j.org/wiki/display/paxurl/Pax+URL).