Bndtools is based on the bnd workspace model as described in the concepts. In its most simple form
this means that there is a single directory that contains all the projects. This directory generally matches
the .git workspace, the gradle workspace, and the Eclipse workspace.
Using the bnd workspace means that you can work almost full time in Eclipse while a continuous integration build with, for example, Github Actions using Gradle is automatically supported.
This page contains a number of videos that explain how to get started with the workspace model. It is assumed that you have a Java VM installed and that Eclipse is running with the latest Bndtools.
If you try this out, it is highly recommended to have the Java 1.8 VM installed as default.
If the 15 minute of videos is too much time, you can find a workspace that contains the work done in the videos at:
https://github.com/aQute-os/com.example
If you like what you see in the videos, you can also read the OSGi Starter PDF. This booklet goes a bit deeper into the Workspace model and its capabilities; it follows the same structure as videos.
The following video shows how to install a workspace from a template and start a playground project with the Apache Felix Gogo shell.
At the end of the previous video, we had Gogo running. The following video shows how to write a simple Hello World Gogo command.
The basic model of OSGi is to develop services that have a distinct, separate, API from the providers. This video shows how to create this API and a simple provider and then run the provider in the playground.
In this video an alternative implementation is developed that uses the API from the previous video but depends on Mozilla Rhino to do the execution of the evaluation expression. It shows how to add a dependency from Maven Central to the workspace.
In this video we export the Rhino and Simple Eval providers into an Executable JAR. This is a JAR that contains all its dependencies, including the framework. For this, we create an application project and an application bndrun file. After testing, we export it to an executable JAR. This JAR is then verified from the command line and shown that you can extract the contents to the file system. As a bonus, the executable JAR is stored and ran as a Docker container.
Software build on your laptop does not count. To develop software professionally, all artifacts must be buildable on an independent server. This is normally called continuous integration (CI). However, it is not possible to run an IDE on a remote server, you need a build tool. With bnd workspaces, there comes an implicit Gradle build. A plugin in Gradle ensures that whatever is done in the IDE is done identically in the CI build by Gradle.
Although you rarely have to use Gradle as a normal developer, this video demonstrates how to run Gradle from the command line.
Github provides the almost perfect software engineering environment! In this video we’ll take our workspace so far
and move it to a Github repository. The workspace template we used, bndtools.workspace.min
contains a .github/workflows/build.yml file. This file is a trigger for Github Actions to automatically build the workspace
on every pull request or build.
You could take a look at OSGi Starter PDF.