Running Equinox OSGi

Equinox OSGi

Eclipse shipped with the Equinox runtime in its IDE package. To use the OSGi console, simply type in command line:

java -jar plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.0.v20070208a.jar

The minimum requirement for the OSGi runtime is the org.eclipse.osgi bundle. To run Equinox in the self plug-in discovery mode (like the one for Eclipse IDE where plug-ins are automatically discovered under /plugins directory), we will need the following setups:

Includes org.eclipse.equinox.common, org.eclipse.update.configurator, org.eclipse.core.runtime and their dependencies in the plugins sub-directory
Includes the config.ini file in the configuration sub-directory
Use the eclipse or eclipsec executable as the launcher

Dependencies

org.eclipse.osgi
org.eclipse.osgi.services
org.eclipse.osgi.util (optional)
org.eclipse.update.configurator (plug-in discovery)
org.eclipse.equinox.launcher (OS specific runtime, assume the present of org.eclipse.core.runtime)
org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86 (OS specific)
org.eclipse.equinox.common
org.eclipse.equinox.registry
org.eclipse.equinox.preferences
org.eclipse.core.job
org.eclipse.core.contenttype
org.eclipse.equinox.app
javax.servlet
org.eclipse.core.runtime
org.eclipse.core.runtime.compatibility.auth

config.ini file

Put the following code in config.ini

osgi.bundles=org.eclipse.equinox.common@2:start,org.eclipse.update.configurator@3:start,org.eclipse.core.runtime@start
osgi.bundles.defaultStartLevel=4

Launcher

Copy eclipse or eclipsec executable and eclipse.ini into the current directory. Add "-console" to eclipse.ini. Also add -Declipse.ignoreApp=true and -Dosgi.noShutdown=true as vmargs in eclipse.ini.

Adding HTTP server support

To add HTTP server support in Equinox, two plugins (and their dependencies) are required:

org.eclipse.equinox.http.registry (extension)
org.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty (server)

Since we are aiming to mix Spring-DM with Equniox, some treatments have been done on the bundle dependencies for logging (due to class loading problem in commons logging with Spring-DM). Basically, we swap org.apache.commons.logging to the implementation from jcl104.over.slf4j. Spring DM provides SLF4J bundles, but it causes problem like cyclic dependency (slf4j + slf4j-log4j12, see: http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.technology.equinox/msg03928.html) and incompatibility issue with commons logging. To fix this, we use the latest binary from slf4j website. The rest of dependencies for HTTP server support are:

org.mortbay.jetty
org.eclipse.equinox.http.servlet
jcl104-over-slf4j-1.5.0 (replacement for org.apache.commons.logging)
slf4j-api-1.5.0 (SLF4J)
slf4j-log4j12-1.5.0 (SLF4J)
org.springframework.osgi.log4j.osgi (Spring)

To enable HTTP server and Equinox's HTTP registry, append org.eclipse.equinox.http.registry@start,org.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty@start to osgi.bundles in config.ini

Adding Spring Support

The following bundles are required:

org.springframework.bundle.osgi.extender (xml context file scanner)
org.springframework.bundle.spring.core
org.springframework.bundle.spring.beans
org.springframework.bundle.spring.context
org.springframework.bundle.spring.aop
org.springframework.osgi.aopalliance.osgi
org.springframework.osgi.backport-util-concurrent.osgi
org.springframework.bundle.osgi.core
org.springframework.bundle.osgi.io

Also add org.springframework.bundle.osgi.extender@3:start (start before org.eclipse.core.runtime) and org.springframework.bundle.spring.core@start to config.ini. For Equinox to resolve the bundle symbolic name, the the spring-osgi-extender-<version>.jar needs to be renamed to org.springframework.bundle.osgi.extender_<version>.jar. Otherwise use the fullname instead of symbolic name in config.ini