Writing OSGi bundle manifests by hand is nothing anyone wants to do, although some entries will always need to be added explicitely. The most prominent of tools for automatically getting imports and exports right is Peter Kriens’ Bnd. However, I found Bnd difficult to manage and to get to work right with Apache Ant. I wanted something simpler because in most cases, you don’t need all the flexibility Bnd provides. Finally, I wanted the bundle descriptor to be written in XML. So, I wrote my own tool. It turned out to work quite well, and it was a good way for me to learn more about OSGi. I’ve finally taken some time to document it and make it available to anyone interested. Please note that it does not aim to handle all possible cases. The idea is to follow the 80:20 rule to ensure ease of use for most use cases.
So, if you produce OSGi bundles using Apache Ant and you’re not quite happy with Bnd or writing bundle metadata by hand, my OSGi Bundle Utility might be something for you. The utility is published under the Apache License v2.0. Source and Binary distributions and documentation is available here.
Hopefully, I’ve followed all the best practice and it is useful to some people. I’ve been using it for over a year now for dozens of bundles and for converting third-party JARs to OSGi bundles. Feedback is welcome!
