Question

We are looking at rearchitecting our web application and want to move to a more modular solution, OSGi seems to meet a lot of our needs.

I’ve come across the Apache Felix project and taken it for a spin. It looks solid yet I find the development cycle a bit slow as it requires a maven build of the bundle(s) to make any code changes effective.

Instead I would like to be able to reload a bundle once classes have been compiled by Eclipse, without any extra building/packaging. Similar to how Tomcat and other servlet containers support deployment of “exploded” war files.

Is this possible to do with Felix or any other OSGi container?

Answer 1

In the Gogo shell, you can do:

install reference:file:/path/to/exploded/directory

This will install an exploded bundle. The format of the exploded directory should be exact that of a bundle JAR file.