OSGi bundle repository with plain Maven JARs - osgi

I am working on to reach a solution to deploy a web application as a bundle to Virgo 3.0.1.RELEASE. My scenario is:
I use Maven Bundle Plugin to generate the manifest.
I exclude all the JAR dependencies using Maven WAR plugin.
I need to command Virgo to host the plain Maven JAR artifacts in the local repository. As an instance Apache Karaf along with PAX can provide plain JAR files as OSGi bundles.
So,
Any ideas on how to configure Virgo for to host Maven repository plain JARs?
Generally, in your experience, what is the best solution to use a ready Maven repository and host it as an OBR?
Thanks in advance.

The best solution I've found so far is actually using Wrap Deployer on Apache Karaf.

Basically stick with Karaf, since it provides all you need :)
With Karaf and the features you don't really need a OBR, since the features service does a pretty good job of resolving already deployed bundles and won't install those again. You need to add the OBR flag to your features file though.

Related

Package and deploy OSGi bundles and Karaf features in Karaf Container

Recently, I have been working on Apache Karaf project.
The first one is a CXF REST service example and the second one is an Apache Karaf Maven example to run and deploy a Karaf container.
What I would like to do is to combine these two. The idea is to download a couple of JAR files from a repository and then package them into a Karaf.
Building Karaf Assembly manually then deploying the created JAR files in my deploy folder under Karaf is not a good idea if the task is reccurent each day. I would very much like to automate this if possible?
To achieve automatic deploy of Java project in Karaf, follow these steps:
Create a feature project: It is a Maven project and its goal is to create a descriptor of JAR (bundles) to be deployed under Karaf. The packaging of this Maven project is feature.
For your project of Karaf Assembly, add your feature as dependency and add it as boot feature so it can be installed when Karaf is up.
Look at this project https://github.com/benson-basis/karaf-feature-version-tc.
It has all the necessary configuration to automate Karaf building and deploy.

no osgi ready dependencies

Currently I'm working with osgi and karaf.
My problem is the no "osgi ready" dependencies , which means a jar that is not ready to be deployed as a bundle into karaf for example.
I tried two solutions in order to deal with this kind of problems :
I tried to to use "Embed-Dependency" which will include the jar
dependency with the project... I don't think this could be a solution
because when I try to embed the jar , it will ask me to include other
jars that the first jar depend on , and so on ..
I tried to convert the no "osgi ready" jars into bundles using bnd tool or from "Plug-in from Existing JAR Archive" from eclipse project.
And this led to the same result , each jar will call another jar that it depend on it..
I am not sure if I'm doing it the wrong way or what is the problem exactly.
Any tips how to deal with no osgi ready dependencies ?
The simplest way to start is to use the wrap: protocol to auto create a jar. Behind the scenes it uses bnd to create a bundle on the fly. Simply prepend wrap: to the mvn url of the jar.
When you try to install the jar using bundle:install -s wrap:mvn:... karaf will tell you which imported packages are missing. Install jars that provide these packages in the same way. The pom of the jar can give you a hint what is missing.
This can mean to install lots of jars if your initial jars has lots of dependencies.
Once you have a list of jars that are installable together you can either create a feature using wrap protocol or you can make bundles from the individual at build time.
In any case you should take a look are the servicemix bundles. It provides OSGi ready bundles for many libraries.

how apache-karaf download required depnedencies by features.xml whithout my intervention in case modification

Please see the image first.
i have multiple instance of apache-karaf, when i change something in my java-project i deploy the jar file inside deploy folder of karaf, and this not good because i have to do that for all instance.
now i dont know very well apache-karaf.
i saw that it's easy to use feature, so i create features.xml in deploy folder.
example.
mvn:org.apache.commons/com.springsource.org.apache.commons.logging/1.1.1
mvn:org.springframework/spring-core/3.1.1.RELEASE
what i want to do, is when i deploy a new jar in my local maven repository and when i change version of org.springframework/spring-core/ to 4.1.1.RELEASE in features.xml for example, i want that karaf download this modification whitout my intervention.
is karaf able to download new depnedencies and delete the older alone?
if it's not clear you can ask me question.
You can use Apache Karaf Cellar and Apache Karaf Cave for this scenario.
Apache Karaf Cellar brings "farming" to Karaf, in this scenario you can configure multiple karaf instances within one group.
Apache Karaf Cave is a central Repository which can be used to provide all required Bundles to Karaf instances.

Gradle, OSGi and OBR (or other repository?)

previously I've been using Maven and the maven-bundle-plugin to archive the following:
When doing mvn install, local maven repo contains my bundle + all my bundle's deps automatically
Local repo becomes OBR repository by mvn bundle:index, also repository.xml is automatically updated with every mvn install.
Local repo can now be used for Karaf bundle deployment
Now, I'm looking to migrate some projects to Gradle, which is very nice in many ways. I'm successfully creating bundles using the 'org.dm.bundle' plugin (basic 'osgi' plugin did not allow me to auto-create service components).
By using Gradle's maven plugin I can do gradle install to install my own bundle in local maven repo. I could then use bindex to manually (or through some gradle hacking) index the repo.
However, my dependencies are not put into the maven repo, they are only stored in the gradle cache dir. Thus, I can not use the OBR repo to deploy in Karaf yet.
I've been looking around a lot trying to find some good solution to this, but I have not found anything.
I've looked at Karaf feature files, which would allow me to specify mvn URLs directly instead of relying on OBR, but I'd like to avoid messing with feature files manually.
There are references to using Nexus, but only Nexus Pro supports OBR from what I can see?
I'm up for suggestions on alternative solutions as well; the main goal is that I shall be able to deploy my bundles + deps in Karaf. Maven does not have to be used at all really, although I need some way for different Gradle projects to find dependencies from some other projects (which are not part of the same multi-project).
Any ideas or discussions to put me on the right track is appreciated!
This may be a bit late, but I just stumbled over your question while looking for a way to fetch with gradle from an OBR repository.
As far as I understood you want to push (gradle deploy) to some Maven repository and use it as an OBR repository. This is possible with Eclipse Package Drone, eclipse/packagedrone. You can deploy using Maven/Gradle deploy and let it generate a P2, OBR and OSGi R5 index repository.

Which way is the best to go for building a webapp as osgi bundle via maven and start them with webstart?

I am looking for a way to reach my vision. What is the best way to go?
Here is my vision:
I would like to build a captain casa app via maven (as a war file).
Then i would like to create a osgi bundle from the builded war via maven.
Next i would like build a artifact which could be downloaded and started via java webstart (jnlp).
The jnlp file should be download the osgi environment with web container support (maybe jetty osgi service), next download osgi bundled war. Then the osgi container and the jetty service should be started and my war should be deployed. Finally the app is running local in a osgi environment.
There are many questions to be answered:
How can i build a captain casa app via maven to a war?
Which maven plugin should be used to build the osgi bundle (pax, maven-bundle-plugin, tycho, ...) What are the differnce?
How to build a jnlp artifact via maven which can deployed on a site?
How must be modified the osgi bundle to support java webstart?
Known informations:
Blog entry to prepare osgi bundle for java webstart.
many pages to maven plugins, such as pax, maven-bundle-plugin, tycho, bnd, ...
It might be worth asking this as 3 separate questions, but when building Web application Bundles I use the maven-bundle-plugin version 2.2.0 (currently unreleased, so you'll need to depend on a snapshot).
Then I use the following file structure:
src/main/java - any .java files
src/main/resources - any non .java files that should be on the classpath
src/main/webapp - static content, images, html files jsps and so on
Then inside the pom once you have configured the normal data for the maven-bundle-plugin you specify the following:
<_wab>src/main/webapp</_wab>
this will cause the static content to be pulled into the bundle and the bundle to be structured with the classes and resources in the WEB-INF/classes directory.

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