jaxclipse

I have been following the Spring and OSGi group on google groups. A common questions there is how well do Spring-DM (formerly Spring-OSGi) and Eclipse RCP play together? I’ll attempt to answer that in general terms here and then move into a more detailed entry that will show step-by-step how to spring-ify your RCP project.

Many eclipse users are familiar with OSGi via Equinox the OSGi reference implementation that is used by eclispe 3.x. For example when you build a plug-in with eclipse there is a MANIFEST.MF and a plugin.xml file. The PDE tooling does a good job of providing a common multi-tab editor for both of these files. But the plugin.xml file contains the eclipse equinox extensions and extension point definitions only. All other bundle configuration is maintained in the MANIFEST.MF file.

The following topics are covered in many places and I can not do them justice here. Google is your friend and you should spend a few minutes getting familiar with each of these:

• Spring basics – dependency injection, separation of concerns, runtime vs. checked exceptions
• OSGi basics – jars plus manifest equals bundle. Equinox, felix, and knopflerfish
• META-INF/spring – ApplicationContext usage – default location in bundle for springconfigs

Topics – 2
pax vs target
maven build
resource issues

Topics – 3
Runtime
Threads