Apache Felix Commons

Purpose

Apache Felix Commons is a community effort to create OSGi bundle ("bundlized") versions of popular third-party open-source libraries. Today, OSGi developers must create bundles out of third-party libraries within their own development communities. The purpose of Felix Commons is to avoid duplicating the effort of bundle creation by sharing these bundlized artifacts. Our hope is that over time, the original developers of the third-party libraries can use these bundlized libraries to learn how to add OSGi metadata to their project artifacts and to become comfortable with the overall non-invasive process. Felix Commons is thus a large "project" of POMs where each bundle POM simply has a dependency on the library it wants to convert. The Felix Maven Bundle Plugin will then convert the dependency automatically and the bundle will be available via existing Maven infrastructure.

This web page will be used to document who is doing what and to provide pointers to more information.

How Can I Help?

If you have libraries you have turned into bundles, then you can offer to contribute them. Additionally, you may request that a certain bundle be created. If you wish to submit a POM file for a specific library, you can attach it to a Felix JIRA issue under the "Felix Commons" component. For Apache purposes, contributing a bundle POM is the same as contributing code.

Getting Started

In most cases, creating bundlized versions of a library is as simple as creating a POM file for the library using Felix' new Maven Bundle Plugin. The OSGi headers are non-intrusive. A JAR can be made in such a way that it runs on the Classpath as well as a bundle in an OSGi framework. In short you:

Set the groupId to:

<groupId>org.apache.felix.commons</groupId>

Append "-osgi" to the name of the artifact:
```
<artifactId>FOO-osgi</artifactId>
```
Set the "packaging" to use the Maven Bundle Plugin:
```
<packaging>bundle</packaging>
```
Set any configuration options in the Maven Bundle Plugin.

We recommend you read the longer steps for converting a library to a bundle.

Contributions

Library	Version	Description	Contributor	Grant OK	Committed
cglib	2.0.2	CGLib	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-beanutils	1.7.0	BeanUtils	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-codec	1.2	Codec	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-configuration	1.3	Configuration	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-digester	1.8	Digester	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-el	1.0	EL	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-fileupload	1.1.1	FileUpload	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-httpclient	3.0.1	Client-side HTTP.	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-io	1.3	IO	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
commons-lang	2.2	Lang	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes
antlr	2.7.6	Parser generator.	John Conlon	Yes	Yes
commons-collections	3.2	Data structures for collections.	John Conlon	Yes	Yes
jzlib	1.0.7	Data compression library.	John Conlon	Yes	Yes
commons-email	1.0	An API for sending email.	Felix Meschberger	Yes	Yes

Supporting Libraries

These are projects that have expressed support for the Felix Commons initiative and that are working directly within their respective projects to support OSGi.

Project	Description	Supporter(s)	More Information
Spring		Adrian Colyer, Andy Piper	Spring-OSGi
SLF4J		Ceki GÃ¼lcÃ¼	SLF4J
Logback		Ceki GÃ¼lcÃ¼	Logback
MINA	NIO framework	Trustin Lee	DIRMINA-27
HTTP Client	Client-side HTTP.	Roland Weber	HTTPCLIENT-639
Apache OFBiz	Enterprise automation.	Christopher Snow	Mailing list archives
Jetty	Servlet engine.	Jan Bartel	Jetty 6.1.5 and onwards uses the 'maven-bundle-plugin'.

Similar Efforts

Eclipse Orbit - http://www.eclipse.org/orbit/

... will provide a repository of bundled versions of third party libraries that are approved for use in one or more Eclipse projects.

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