OSGI - handling 3rd party JARs required by a bundle

java jar osgi
William picture William · Aug 27, 2009 · Viewed 50.3k times · Source

I'm just getting started with OSGI development and am struggling to understand how best to handle dependant JARs.

i.e. if I'm creating a bundle the likelyhood is that I will need to use a few 3rd party JARs. When I create my bundle JAR to deploy to OSGI, obviously these 3rd party JARs are not included and thus the bundle will not run.

I understand that one option is to turn these JARs into bundles and also deploy them to the OSGI container. However if they only need to be used by the one bundle this doesn't seem ideal.

What is the best solution to this? Can the JARs be embedded within the bundle JAR and if so is this a reasonable approach?

Answer

William picture William · Aug 27, 2009

You can include a third party jar inside your bundle by adding the third party jar to the root directory of the bundle jar file and then adding a bundle classpath header to the bundle's manifest, e.g.:

Bundle-ClassPath: .,my3rdparty.jar

If you want to place third party jar to subdirectory, specify the path without using heading ./, e.g

Bundle-ClassPath: .,lib/my3rdparty.jar # (not ./lib/my3rdparty.jar)

Related questions

Non-osgi library usage in an osgi application

Is it possible to use a non-osgi library with an OSGi application? For an example, I'm developing a semantic based search engine, and I am using a third party Natural Language Processing library for it (http://wiki.opencog.org/w/…

Read More
Can't execute jar- file: "no main manifest attribute"

I have installed an application, when I try to run it (it's an executable jar) nothing happens. When I run it from the commandline with: java -jar "app.jar" I get the following message: no main manifest attribute, in "app.…

Read More
Running JAR file on Windows

I have a JAR file named helloworld.jar. In order to run it, I'm executing the following command in a command-line window: java -jar helloworld.jar This works fine, but how do I execute it with double-click instead? Do I …

Read More