Have you ever worked with OSGi Declarative Services (DS) within an Eclipse context… like an RCP application? Do you remember the pain of figuring out how to hack DS so it’s always started so your services can be available? Well, in Eclipse 3.5, this process will be a lot easier. For example, starting with Eclipse 3.5M5, PDE will allow you to modify start levels of PDE-based launch configurations:

PDE is also smart enough to suggest that DS should always be started so you don’t always have to worry about it. On top of that, the product definition format now has the ability to modify start levels which should help you when you’re building and packaging RCP applications:

If you don’t know much about DS, but would like to learn, I highly recommend these two introductory articles by Neil Bartlett:

• Getting Started with OSGi: Introducing Declarative Services
• Getting Started with OSGi: Declarative Services and Dependencies

The Equinox OSGi book also has great, indepth content on Declarative Services if you’re interested.

In the end, I think DS is a great lightweight way to work with services as it helps you avoid a lot of the tricky and error-pone code you have to write while working with services. Hope this helps!

Related posts:

• OSGi and Start Levels
• OSGi and Equinox Book Updated
• Equinox OSGi book on Rough Cuts
• OSGi Declarative Services Tooling
• OSGi and Equinox book available!

Tags: eclipse, equinox, OSGi, pde, tips