Osmorc

In the last few weeks work on Osmorc has been a bit slow due to team changes, the holidays and a few personal things I had to attend to. However, development has come up to speed again so I’d like to bring up a few of the things I am working at to your attention.

• Pax Runner: There were many requests on the issue tracker and the plugin page to support Pax Runner. Current integration looks promising, the basic things like starting up a framework and deploying some bundles work very well. More advanced stuff like Eclipse applications and debugging is still in the works.
• UI Changes: The UI will be further streamlined. The run configuration dialog has become somewhat bloated and looks a bit different for each OSGi service - this will change. I am also looking at splitting up IDE and Project configuration so Osmorc behaves like all other plugins in that regard.
• Interaction with the running OSGi framework: Currently we only provide a console for Equinox and nothing for other OSGi frameworks. First step will be providing a console for all frameworks. A second step could be some graphical interaction (something like the GUI that Knopflerfish provides).
• Documentation: OSGi is a complex matter and Osmorc usage isn’t as straightforward as it could be. The documentation is somewhat outdated as well. A few tutorial videos could help as well.

So far these are the things being currently under work. The blog will hopefully see a few more entries than pure release announcements in 2010 as well. So stay tuned in . If you work with Osmorc and require a feature, please feel free to submit an issue to the issue tracker.

The Osmorc blog has now been moved over to a new server. A few links might still be broken but this will be fixed in the next few days. Development on Osmorc is continuing, there will be another post about future development here soon.

I’m leaving this project. Read about the reasons for it on my personal blog.

It’s not the end of the project though as Jan intends to keep on developing Osmorc.

Osmorc 1.1.0 is actually the second release of Osmorc for IDEA Community Edition. The first one was released last week. We didn’t announce it then, but now it’s official. Osmorc is now also available for the community edition and to celebrate this we also release a preview of a new user’s guide for Osmorc.

We are aware that Osmorc needs documentation. We keep being asked the same question over and over again. So we take a new try at the task of providing documentation. This time it’s a book - a user’s guide -. It’s far from finished. Currently it’s only available as PDF and only in the A4 format, but we’ll provide other formats in the future and maybe we’ll generate JavaHelp and other formats from it.

The plugin is available through IDEA’s plugin manager and the user’s guide can be downloaded from our SourceForge project page. The user’s guide may also be of interest to users of IDEA Ultimate which bundles the plugin.

Yesterday we released version 0.14.0 for IDEA 8. This release contains nearly all of the features and bugfixes we’ve done for the bundled IDEA 9 version we’ve been developing since early May.

Here’s the changelog:

• Merged Equinox Run config into OSGi Bundles run config.
• QuickFix that registers a Bundle Activator in the manifest file or Osmorc facet configuration.
• Osmorc facet detection now only requires that a manifest file contains a Bundle-SymbolicName.
• Osmorc now makes sure that a manifest file is not readonly before trying to change it.
• Bundle compiler has been rewritten and now supports bnd files much better.
• Facet configuration dialog has received a rework to make it more intuitive to use.
• Lots of smaller bugfixes.

This will most likely be the last Osmorc release for IDEA 8.

Some of you may already have heard the big news. Osmorc will be a bundled plugin in the next major release of IDEA, which is codenamed Maia and will most likely become IDEA 9.

The first Maia EAP releases already contain Osmorc. We are currently also adding changes we do for the Maia version to the IDEA 8 version and will have some more releases of Osmorc for IDEA 8, but eventually at some point in the future we will switch to only develop the Maia version.

You should be able to open projects using Osmorc with Maia and find that they still work. Be sure to make a backup of your project settings as you might not be able to open it with IDEA 8 and find that it still works there afterwards. Maia-Osmorc for example converts all Equinox run configurations to enhanced OSGi bundle run configurations. That kind of enhanced OSGi Bundle run configuration is not available in the current Osmorc release for IDEA 8. It will be available in the next IDEA 8 version, though.

Please note that issues for Maia-Osmorc should be posted on the component OSGI Support in the project IDEA Feedback. Please also post new feature requests in that area and not in the old Osmorc project.

After a few months of work we have finally released Osmorc 0.13.0, which can be downloaded using IntelliJ’s plugin manager. The most notable new feature is integration with IntelliJs Maven plugin:

• Osmorc can now detect if your maven configuration indicates that the project is an OSGi bundle and will automatically create/update an Osmorc facet, once you synchronize your POM with IntelliJ.
• Manifest headers that are configured with the maven-bundle-plugin will be read from your POM and entered into the facet configuration.
• When you open the POM, Osmorc will detect and highlight any dependencies which are not OSGi-ready (e.g are missing the OSGi headers in their manifest).
• As a quick fix for this situation Osmorc now contains a search dialog which helps you in finding an OSGi-capable replacement for these dependencies inside the Springsource repository.
• Osmorc will also add the repository URLs for the Springsource Repository to your POM, if you chose to import a library from there through the search dialog.

There were also some minor improvements:

• The default rule which is used for bundlifying non-OSGi libraries is now “Import-Package: *;resolution:=optional”. This is the same rule that is used within the maven-bundle-plugin and should therefore work in most cases.
• Bnd configuration files which were set up in the facet configuration are now actually used -there were ignored in the past.

As always, we are asking for your feedback on this new version. Feel free to drop us a line here or file an issue at our Issue Tracker.

This release fixes some bugs (see this version in Jira) and brings the following notable changes and features:

• Added autocompletion for known manifest header names.
• Equinox 3.4 source bundles are now used correctly.
• Reworked additional JAR contents section in facet configuration. Source files and directories are now selected via a file chooser and a destination name that will most times be correct is inferred.
• Splitted the facet editor into smaller parts.
• Changes to files belonging to the additional JAR contents of a bundle now trigger a rebuild of the JAR.
• Added specific Equinox, Bnd and Spring DM headers to the headers known by Osmorc.

Note that you’ll have to edit each entry in the additional JAR contents since the paths are now stored differently. In most cases selecting an entry, clicking “Edit” and confirming the default choices will suffice.

Osmorc won a “Honorable Mention” prize at the “IntelliJIDEAL Plugin 2008 contest”.

Developing Osmorc and the positive and helpful feedback from its users is already highly motivating. The prize adds to this motivation.

After one year in development and 11 releases the plugin is far from being finished. We feel that it’s already quite useful, but there’s so much that can be done, that should be done and that will be done to further improve it.

Stay tuned for another year of Osmorc updates.

This end of year release has some new features for running Equinox products and applications and fixes a critical bug in the OSGi Bundles run configuration.

The critical bug prevented the usage of the OSGi Bundles run configuration in most cases. So anyone using or trying to use it should update.

For the Equinox run configuration type the following features were added:

• additional JVM parameters can specified.
• additional Equinox parameters can be specified.
• the runtime directory can be specified
• products and applications based on Eclipse 3.1 and 3.2 can be run

A regular expression can be specified to filter out files from the additional JAR contents.

Thanks for contributions for this release to Nick Pratt.