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Purpose

Apache Felix Commons is a community effort to create OSGi bundle ("bundlized") versions of popular third-party open-source libraries. Today, OSGi users all end up creating bundles out of various common libraries, so rather than each of us duplicating the effort, we can do it as a community and share these bundlized artifacts. Our hope is that over time, the original developers of the third-party libraries can use these bundlized libraries to both 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. A set of steps for converting a library to a bundle is also available. In short you:

  1. Set the groupId to: 
    <groupId>org.apache.felix.commons</groupId>
  2. Append "-osgi" to the name of the artifact: 
    <artifactId>FOO-osgi</artifactId>
  3. Set the "packaging" to use the Maven Bundle Plugin: 
    <packaging>bundle</packaging>
  4. Set any configuration options in the Maven Bundle Plugin.

Contribution Status

Potential contributions by Felix Meschberger:

  • BeanUtils, Codec, Collections, Configuration, Digester, EL, FileUpload, HTTPClient, IO, Lang, and CGLib.

Potential contributions by John Conlon:

  • antlr (2.7.6), commons-collections (3.2), commons-lang (2.1)

Potential contribution by Tim Moloney:

  • commons-logging
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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