Cristina Gutiu wrote:I assume your latest book is covering this experience in details, but could you please make a briefing here on how do you use Pax tools while working with OSGi, and which are your favorite ones?
I became familiar with the Pax tools via Pax Runner. I was looking for a way to launch an OSGi container with a given set of bundles pre-installed and started. Trying to do that with Equinox or Felix by themselves proved to be cumbersome and the technique varied between the different framework implementations. Pax Runner unifies all of the OSGi framework implementations so that you can start them up with a set of bundles all the same way. It was exactly what I was looking for.
Once hooked on Pax Runner, I came into contact with Pax Construct. Hands down, this is my favorite Pax tool. Basically, Pax Construct brings a script/template-driven development model (ala, Rails or Grails) for OSGi. It takes a lot of the work out of developing the boilerplate pieces of OSGi bundles and leaves it to me to implement the most interesting stuff.
Then, there are other Pax goodies such as Pax Exam that lets me create a
JUnit 4
test that loads up OSGi with a selection of bundles and perform assertions against that installation and the services exposed by those bundles.
I could catalog the entire Pax toolchest here, but those three are my favorites, by far.