Explore Eclipse's OSGi console

Starting with V3.0, Eclipse has made a huge leap by choosing the Open Service Gateway Protocol, open Services gateways Initiative,osgi, to replace the unstable Eclipse plug-in technology in previous releases. This transition is almost transparent to the user, because the plugin you are using now installs and operates in a manner that does not look any different from the previous plugin.

Figure 1. Plug-ins within Eclipse

Because Eclipse is now built on OSGi, the plug-in we see in Figure 1 is a fully functional OSGi package. (Figure 2 shows the use of the OSGi console to run the packages within the Eclipse instance.) Supports industry-approved open standards by using osgi,eclipse and can now take advantage of the functionality provided by OSGi, including security, HTTP services, user management, and other features. Eclipse's use of OSGi has been effective because we see a decrease in the number of conflicts reported between Plug-ins and an increase in eclipse applications.

Figure 2. OSGi Packages within Eclipse

Eclipse, Equinox, OSGi, God!

OSGi Alliance is an independent, non-profit organization that is responsible for OSGi technology, similar to the functions of Eclipse Foundation. OSGi Alliance is responsible for developing specifications that describe OSGi technology. In short, OSGI technology provides a service-oriented component-based platform for application development. All implementations are based on these specifications. One of the most common implementations is Equinox, which is the specification implementation of Eclipse. Another common implementation of OSGi is Apache's Felix project.

Before we proceed, this article assumes that you have experience in Eclipse and OSGi. If not, it is recommended to read Scott Delap's article "Understanding how the Eclipse plug-in uses OSGi" before studying the OSGi console.

Creating an OSGi Package

The first step in this adventure is to create a simple OSGi package in Eclipse using the plug-in development environment (Plug-in Development Environment,pde). To do this, you need to create a new plug-in project using PDE (File > New > Project > Plug-in Project). During the process of creating a new plug-in project, make sure that the correct options are set. First, choose the plug-in target platform as the OSGi Framework, specifically Equinox. Finally, for brevity, use the Hello OSGi Bundle template provided by PDE (see Figure 3). We now create the packages that will be used in this article.

Figure 3. PDE Hello OSGi Bundle Wizard