Launching OSGi from IDEA

Question

I develop scala application using IntelliJ IDEA. I'd like my application modules to be OSGi bundles. In Eclipse it is possible to create a project which is both scala project and plug-in project. Eclipse also supports launching of Equinox platform and provides great configuration tool of which bundles to start and how. But I can't use Eclipse because of poor and slow scala plugin, so I need to use IntelliJ IDEA. In IDEA I tried Osmorc for running OSGi but this solution is very immature and doesn't work well. What are the other ways of launching and configuring an OSGi application from IDEA?

Answer 1

Not an exact answer, but one possibility would be to:

• set up a scala project with sbt and Intellij
• use bnd4sbt (It enables you to create OSGi bundles for your SBT projects)
• use scalamodules (a domain specific language for OSGi development)

(All thanks to the work of WeigleWilczek, including Heiko Seeberger who contributes here)

Answer 2

All the OSGi frameworks can be launched as standard Java processes. For example to launch Felix:

java -jar path/to/felix.jar

To launch Equinox:

java -jar path/to/org.eclipse.osgi_version.jar

And so on.

Unfortunately the initial configuration differs substantially between framework implementations. For Felix you need a config.properties file, which is typically in the conf directory of the Felix installation directory (or you can set the felix.config.properties system property to point it elsewhere).