IDE development tools - Enterprise OSGi in Action - page 229

Like PDE , the bndtools bnd file editor also includes a nice GUI interface for defining
Declarative Services. More accurately, bndtools provides a GUI to generate a bnd file,
and the bnd file is then used to generate XML files that define the Declarative Services!

9.2 OSGi support in other IDEs

Although we've talked about a range of development tools, they've all been based on
the Eclipse IDE . What if you prefer a different IDE ? Well, you do have some options.
Because of its early internal adoption of OSG i, Eclipse is dominant in the field of OSG i
development, but other IDE s are catching up.

9.2.1 NetBeans

NetBeans is a free IDE that integrates closely with the GlassFish server. In recent years,
both NetBeans and GlassFish have greatly increased their OSG i support. NetBeans has
a concept of modules , and these modules map reasonably well to OSG i bundles; Net-
Beans modules encode module information in a module's MANIFEST.MF , and these
headers map nicely to OSG i headers. NetBeans modules have the notion of names,
versions, public packages, and required module dependencies (but not package-level
dependencies). When creating a NetBeans module, you can mark it as an OSG i bun-
dle by ticking Generate OSG i Bundle (see figure 9.11).

Figure 9.11 NetBeans provides a GUI editor to choose which packages you want to export from a module.