With the increasing focus on OSGi in Enterprise Java, there has been increasing focus on creating OSGi bundles for deployment. When a development team is creating their own bundles, it is easy for them to focus on identifying Imports and Exports and ensuring that their manifests are correct. When it comes time to use third-party enterprise libraries however, things start to break down.

Many of these libraries are not packaged as OSGi bundles. In fact, many of them have internal architectures and designs that do not lend themselves to controls that OSGi provides. In this case, a user must retrofit OSGi directives to the library before use.

This is where SpringSource Bundlor comes in. It can be very hard for a developer to know exactly what dependencies are needed by a library using simple inspection. Bundlor is a tool that automates the detection of dependencies and the creation of OSGi manifest directives for JARs after their creation. Bundlor takes as input a JAR and a template consisting of a superset of the standard OSGi manifest headers. Bundlor analyses the source code and support files contained in the JAR, applies the template to the results, and generates a manifest.

The use of Bundlor can take different forms, from tasks for Apache ANT and plugins for Apache Maven, to simple command line execution for integration into any existing build system.

Before you start using Bundlor, please take a moment to look at the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository; you may find that what you are looking for has already been updated. If you convert a library for your own use and think that it might be useful to the community at large, please submit your bundle information to the Enterprise Bundle Repository for inclusion.