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Sonatype pushes OSGi bundles to Nexus


By Alex Handy
March 31, 2009 — 
Maven creator Jason van Zyl has listened to the pain points in the OSGi world. Among them were the lack of availability of OSGi bundles for standard files, as well as the difficulty in pushing bundle builds into an automated workflow. On Friday, van Zyl's company, Sonatype, will add support for OSGi bundles to its Nexus artifact repository.

Van Zyl said he spoke with many developers who use OSGi in their workplace at last week's EclipseCon. He said that a commonality among the users he spoke with was the desire for a repository to store and manage OSGi bundles. The OSGi Alliance itself created the specifications for the OSGi Bundle Repository many years back, but van Zyl said that there is currently no mature implementation of this specification.

Though Apache Felix does use the standard, van Zyl felt that his company's existing repository for Maven users could easily fill the gap, both internally at companies already using Nexus and externally by offering a central hosted repository for OSGi bundles.

To that end, Sonatype has created a number of tools to assist in the creation and management of bundles. While Nexus support arrives Friday, Sonatype has already released Tycho, an application that can turn standard software elements into OSGi bundles. The forthcoming Maven 2 Eclipse project will also bring translation capabilities for Maven and Eclipse, unifying the two workflows associated with each environment.

“Trying to build OSGi-based applications in an automated way is extremely painful,” said van Zyl. “The tools for provisioning servers and desktops are also pretty weak. We've created a bundle repository that's very similar to Maven Central. We now have a  way to deploy bundles to Nexus, and we have a way for people to consume bundles from Nexus and to provision Eclipse runtimes for Nexus.”

Much of the work van Zyl and his team are focusing on is specific to the infrastructure required to support a large number of developers using Eclipse. Nexus, said van Zyl, has a surprisingly large following based on this use-case, which van Zyl admits he did not anticipate. As such, he sees the expansion into OSGi support as a natural progression, following Eclipse as it moves into the runtime and server-side space.

To kick off the Nexus support for OSGi bundles, van Zyl said that the central Maven repository controlled by the Apache Foundation now has a sibling in the form of a publicly accessible OSGi bundle repository. He said that many common assets are used in OSGi builds and deployments, but that bundled versions of these assets were not easily available until now.

“We have already set up an initial bundle repository at osgi.sonatype.org, where we host our first publicly available bundles for people to look at,” said van Zyl.


Related Search Term(s): OSGi, Sonatype


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Comments

04/02/2009 06:27:20 AM EST

Love to see this happening! Ok, nitpick. There is no specification from the OSGi for a Bundle Repository. What has been available over the last 4 years is a draft RFC that describes a bundle repository. This RFC was written to allow experimentation and feedback. We are currently in the process in taking another look at this orphaned RFC and will likely come out with a real specification later this year. Kind regards, Peter Kriens

FrancePeter Kriens


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