[equinox-dev] Accessing Plugins from WAS

[Richard Piazza <rpiazza@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm using WAS 6.1.  I have constructed
Web Services using the wizards in AST 6.1.  I want the implementation
of these services to call plugin code.  I know that there are several
problems here - including the fact that WAS 6.1 uses Eclipse 3.1 plugins,
and the functionality I seek is more related to Eclipse 3.2.

It was suggested that I use the Equinox bridge.  This seems difficult,
because the servlets that I'm using are created via the wizards in AST,
and I find it hard to determine how I would register them so the bridge
could access them. 

What I decided to do instead was to subclass the FrameworkLauncher, removing
most of the servlet references (and currently hardcoding the access to
the bridge war, which contains my plugins that I need).  Looking at
the BridgeServlet code, it changes the context classloader of the running
thread, and then calls the proxy servlet, which will call the registered
servlet.  I figured, that I could create the appropriate context classloader
using my FrameworkLauncher class, and then before I try to load the first
plugin class, I would change the context classloader to the one I just
created. 

This seemed to almost work, but the context classloader was not
able to load/find any plugin classes, beyond the ones related to the framework
itself.  On the other hand, the framework started just fine, and loaded
all of my bundles.  However, when I look at the context classloader
that is created, it seems like there is no connection between it and the
bundle classloaders created by the framework. 

Am I just on the wrong track?  Is what I'm trying to do just silly??
 Is there any hints you can provide?? 

Any help would be greatly appeciated! 

Rich Piazza
IBM Rational Software
20 Maguire Road
Lexington, MA 02421
781-676-2462
781-676-2540 (Fax)