TableOfContents

Introduction

[http://wiki.ops4j.org/confluence/display/ops4j/Pax Pax] is a project to develop tools for OSGi bundles. Pax-Construct, which is a part of Pax project, is a tool to create, build, manage and deploy OSGi bundles. The basic idea is that instead of writing all pom.xml files manually, generate those using simple shell commands.

Create New OSGi Project

• Install Pax-Construct - Essentially, Pax-Construct is a collection of scripts, so you can install this by uncompress the zip file somewhere on your local disk space, and set the path to the directory. For example, if you unzip the pax-construct version 1.3 to PAX_HOME, you need to set the path to:

PAX_HOME/pax-construct-1.3/bin

• Create Project - You can run the following shell script to create a sample Spring-OSGi project named project1.

##############################################
# Template for Spring-OSGi projects #
##############################################

# (1) Create Project "project1"
pax-create-project -g org.cytoscape -a project1
cd project1

# (2) Add SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repositories
pax-add-repository -i com.springsource.repository.bundles.release -u http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/release
pax-add-repository -i com.springsource.repository.bundles.external -u http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/external

# (3) Import required bundles
pax-import-bundle -g org.springframework.osgi -a org.springframework.osgi.extender -v 1.1.0 -- -DimportTransitive -DwidenScope
pax-import-bundle -g org.slf4j -a com.springsource.slf4j.simple -v 1.5.0
pax-import-bundle -g org.slf4j -a com.springsource.slf4j.api -v 1.5.0
pax-import-bundle -g org.aopalliance -a com.springsource.org.aopalliance -v 1.0.0
pax-import-bundle -g org.objectweb.asm -a com.springsource.org.objectweb.asm -v 3.1.0

# (4) Create bundles
pax-create-bundle -p org.cytoscape.helloservice -- -Dspring -Djunit
pax-create-bundle -p org.cytoscape.helloserviceuser -- -Dspring -Djunit

# (5) Build and run the project
mvn clean install pax:provision

Description for Each Section

1. pax-create-project command creates a new OSGi project in the current working directory. By -g option, you can specify group id of this project.

2. In general, you CANNOT use existing library files (jar files registered at the maven central repository) as OSGi bundle. There are two options to solve this problem:

   • Wrap existing jar files by pax-wrap-jar command

   • Use OSGi bundle repository instead of maven central repository

   In this example, I used the second option. pax-add-repository command adds an additional maven repository location to the pom file. SpringSource manages a maven repository [http://www.springsource.com/repository/app/ SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository], which is a repository of OSGi bundles. All library files in this repository are wrapped as OSGi bundles.

3. pax-import-bundle command automatically generates <dependency> statement in the project pom file. In this example, bundles required to run [http://www.springframework.org/osgi Spring Dynamic Modules] are imported.

Useful Commands