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Bundle is an OSGi Alliance term for a module in an OSGi Service Platform. A Bundle is packaged as a regular jar file with additional entries in its manifest. Every jar file in the repository is a valid OSGi bundle and can be deployed as-is into an OSGi Service Platform and the SpringSource dm Server. Bundles in the repository all define the following information:
- Bundle-Name: the human-readable name of the bundle, for example, "Spring Core".
- Bundle-SymbolicName: a string that (along with the version information) uniquely identifies the bundle. Symbolic names follow reverse domain-name conventions - for example, "org.springframework.core".
- Bundle-Version: the version of the bundle, e.g. 2.5.4
- Export-Package: the packages exported by the bundle. In OSGi only packages that are exported by the bundle are visible to other bundles. Packages that are not exported remain private to the bundle. When searching the repository for bundles providing certain classes or resources, only the exported packages are displayed and searched. Every package is exported with version information, for example, the Spring Core bundle, version 2.5.4 exports version 2.5.4 of the org.springframework.core package.
- Import-Package: the package-level dependencies of the bundle. These may be optional or mandatory dependencies. Each import specifies the version range it is compatible with (e.g. "version 2.5.0 or higher").
Where to find existing the
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bundles
Most of the libraries we use currently are available on the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository and can be retrieved by Ivy.
Wrapping jar files into OSGi bundles
For the libraries that are not available as OSGi bundles, we need to create the bundle on our own. The tool that can help is Bnd. In the attachment of the page there is bnd-1.50.0.jar that can be used to generate the OSGi bundles from the existing jars via command line:
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