Working with Maven, OSGi and Bndtools

Question

Today I was asked whether it is a good idea to use Maven in our current OSGi application. We used Bndtools and its great since it makes development as easy as possible. Bndtools

Answer 1

I think if pretty much anything you do centers around Maven, then Apache Felix Maven plugin (also based on BND, by the way) is the way to go.

Otherwise if you want to use Maven but in a less central role, Eclipse Tycho makes a lot of sense. Tycho is a set of Maven plugins.

Using Tycho you supply the target platform from Eclipse to Maven, and then it can resolve all bundles by looking at your MANIFEST and target platform. The pom.xml files are really simple for Tycho projects, as they do not contain your dependencies.

Tycho is obviously very Eclipse centric. If you don't use eclipse I don't think it makes much sense, but sometimes it is easier to incorporate in an existing project.

Either way, you can still use the Apache Felix Maven plugin to generate OBR metadata in the deploy phase.