[equinox-dev] PDE and OSGi

[Dejan Glozic <dejan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

For the regular contributors on this mailing list (and those in the know):

PDE will invest about 2 person-months starting now to try to add
rudimentary OSGi support. By Christmas, our goal is to have the 'soup to
nuts' scenario working. This scenario would include:

   Creating a new 'Hello, World' bundle using 'New Bundle' wizard + PDE
   template support
   Getting META-INF/manifest.mf + extensions.xml generated
   Converting an existing plug-in into a bundle
   Being able to use 'Update Classpath...' action on pure bundles
   Being able to launch second Eclipse instance and see the 'Hello, world'
   bundle running
   Being able to build (deploy) the bundle into the external JAR or zip
   (subject to availability of the bundle Ant script generator from PDE
   Build)

The goal is to have a familiar PDE experience extended to bundles. We will
use it as a learning opportunity and to enable PDE to supply tooling where
it is needed the most (the priorities are most likely to change over time
so we want to get Hello World up and running first and see where to go from
there).

This time around, we will put editor support on the back burner and
register a simple source editor with the outline for extensions.xml, and no
editor for manifest.mf (if given time, we may quickly hack a simple
PDE-like editor with enhanced support for managing dependencies/imports
because that is an area where extra tooling is probably needed the most at
the moment).

I have noticed that Eclipse OSGi spec is moving at an alarming speed
(fragment bundles, modules??, inter-module dependency etc.). Is it too much
to ask to keep all these changes in one file (accessible from the Eclipse
OSGi home page) that will be kept reasonably up to date so that we can
check it out often to make sure we are in sync with you? What we are
looking for is an equivalent of 'Plug-in Manifest DTD' document we had for
Eclipse plug-ins. We would like to know all the new keys/concepts added and
how they manifest (pun not intended :-) in the bundle manifest.

I know that maintaining a document seems like work but without it you will
have to reply to my questions on this mailing list, so you will have to
type some text somewhere either way :-).

Regards,

Dejan Glozic, Ph.D.
Manager, Eclipse Platform Components
D2/MY7/8200/MKM
IBM Canada Ltd.
Tel. 905 413-2745  T/L 969-2745
Fax. 905 413-4854