Plugin Dependency Management outside Eclipse

Today I searched for a solution to simplify using the actifsource ant task. Until now, all actifsource scopes (either an eclipse project or a bundle) have to be defined using a special actifsource ant-task, which takes a classpath. When making heavy usage of bundles, these classpaths can really become long and updating them by hand is not very convenient.

One idea I had to improve this is to define the plugin-directory directly and only point to the required bundles by their symbolic names. To do this we need to load the plugin outside of eclipse. The first place to start was to have a deeper look into equinox and see if there is a way to simply load all plugins and use them to load the required classes. At the moment we don't need to activate the bundles.

Sadly the equinox framework seems to strongly rely on some properties and requires the existence configuration files on the files ystem. Reusing the implementations like BaseAdaptor, Framework, HookRegistry and BaseStorage isn't really an option since they are strongly bound together. Some of the classes have only package private constructors, others have public constructors but taking one of the private classes as parameter. Time to search another solution. OSGi is an open standard and every implementation should be able to load the bundles.

The solution I found, was Apache Felix. It was said to be easy in setup and when I tried an example I was really glad to find out that this is true.

The following code allows me to load a bundle located in the plugin directory:

Felix felix = new Felix(Collections.emptyMap());
try {
felix.start();
} catch (BundleException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
return;
}
File bundleDir = new File("C:\\eclipseLocation\\plugins");
Bundle bundle = felix.getBundleContext().installBundle("locationId", new FileInputStream(new File(bundleDir, "bundle.jar")));

This is really short. Using this approach to load all bundles from the bundle-Directory would allow us to search for the bundles by their symbolic name and directly refer to them. No more classpath setup in every ant-file. Maybe we could also load some extension point definitions and and simplify the whole registration of generator tasks.