Understand OSGI Bundle Build And Deployment

OSGi stands for Open Service Gateway initiative. For daily development of OSGI bundles, we need to understand how it build and deployed. I have a simple camel osgi project which comes with camel 2.10.4 in examples/apache/camel/camel-example-osgi. In this short blogger, I want to explain what happened when you build and deploy the osgi bundle.

Here are the simple procedures I build and deploy the bundle:

    cd ${apache-camle-home}/examples/apache/camel/camel-example-osgi
    mvn clean install

Where the build Requests?

You should see the following lines at the end of the build.

[INFO] --- maven-bundle-plugin:2.3.7:install (default-install) @ camel-example-osgi ---
[INFO] Installing org/apache/camel/camel-example-osgi/2.10.4/camel-example-osgi-2.10.4.jar
[INFO] Writing OBR metadata
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 1:11.876s
[INFO] Finished at: Sun Feb 02 16:04:17 CST 2014
[INFO] Final Memory: 26M/435M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------




This means the build is successful. But what has maven done?
if you cd to you maven repository, which normally is located at $HOME/.m2/reposity. In my case, it is under:

    C:\Users\gliu\.m2\repository\org\apache\camel\camel-example-osgi\2.10.4


You can see that:
     org.apache.camel    --> groupID
     camel-example-osgi  --> artifact ID
     2.10.4              --> version number


Under that directory you should see the following files:
   camel-example-osgi-2.10.4.pom
   camel-example-osgi-2.10.4-features.xml
   camel-example-osgi-2.10.4.jar
   _remote.repositories




 How to deploy the artifact to OSGi container 

The deployment is straight forward. In the karaf container command line, you can type the following:

      osgi:install mvn:org.apache.camel/camel-example-osgi/2.10.4
      start 438


Where 438 is bundle id. Here is a windows snapshot: