OSGi seems to have an excellent benefit of having small deployable artifacts by not wrapping dozens of JAR dependencies into a lib directory. However, I can\'t find anything tha
If you create an OSGi application and a classic Java application that do the same thing and use the same libraries then you'll need exactly the same set of JARs. The big difference is being able to explicitly define your dependencies (and possibly produce more granular JARs for your application).
There's only one pure OSGi-based server that I know of (Eclipse's Virgo, previously Spring's DM Server). Glassfish and Websphere have support for OSGi, but I haven't played with them so I can't say much. What I can say is that all of them require an OSGi container and that's usually Eclipse's Equinox or Apache's Felix.
Your question seems to really be about provisioning the application (working out what needs to be deployed). I know that for Maven 3.0 they've done a bunch of stuff working with Eclipse's P2 provisioning framework.
For your application are you deploying an EAR or WAR? For either of those, your build system will need to produce the archive with all dependencies or it won't work. It's a bit confusing on why you have a problem because people use Maven because it does the transitive dependency management for their builds.
There is a fundamental aspect of your question that is not yet addressed.
Glassfish is indeed a full fledged Application server like most modern application servers: these provide you with a Web container (where you would deploy WAR archives), a Java EE container (to deploy EJB's in JAR and EAR archives), as well as integrate an OSGI container. The later is then used for the application server's own internal start-up mechanisms.
In essence, you may target three containers. Modern IDE's and build tools provide you with means to pack your logic to target any of these. So the question becomes: how do I architect my application with all those possibilities?
There are a few very important technical issues not to lose from sight. (I focus here on objective and factual considerations, keeping out from any subjective choices, philosophy, strategy, and other context-dependent considerations that indeed may also weight much on your final decision):
The question is rich and its analysis is complex. Further consideration must take into account the nature of the application to build. Moreover, if you intend to use development frameworks like open source Spring and/or Camel, as well as vendor specific ones like Oracle Fusion SOA composites, JBoss Switchyard, etc. you will have many other technical constraints to take into consideration.
There is no "one-size-fits-all" answer in these matters and that, in essence, justifies the current plethora of overlapping technologies.
When that architecture question is first solved, then you can look to optimize productivity with a suitable configuration management and deployment repository.
There are a number of ways to deploy dependent bundles to OSGi containers. Here are some of them:
You first need to create an XML index file for your available bundles, using a tool such as bindex. If you are using the maven-bundle-plugin, then it automatically maintains an OBR index in ~/.m2/repository/repository.xml.
Load the index using the OBR command-line interface:
> obr:addUrl file:/Users/derek/.m2/repository/repository.xml
Then ask OBR to deploy your target bundle, with dependencies determined from the OBR index:
> obr:deploy com.paremus.posh.sshd
Target resource(s):
-------------------
Paremus Posh Ssh Daemon (1.0.23.SNAPSHOT)
Required resource(s):
---------------------
Paremus Command API (1.0.23.SNAPSHOT)
Optional resource(s):
---------------------
Paremus Config Admin Commands (1.0.23.SNAPSHOT)
Paremus OSGi & LDAP Types (1.0.23.SNAPSHOT)
Karaf supports "features", which are basically lists of bundles required to provide the feature:
karaf@root> features:info obr
Description of obr 2.0.0 feature
----------------------------------------------------------------
Feature has no configuration
Feature has no dependencies.
Feature contains followed bundles:
mvn:org.apache.felix/org.apache.felix.bundlerepository/1.6.4
mvn:org.apache.karaf.shell/org.apache.karaf.shell.obr/2.0.0
mvn:org.apache.karaf.features/org.apache.karaf.features.obr/2.0.0
karaf@root> features:install obr
Virgo uses plans to define the artifacts that comprise an application and it is able to automatically supply the dependencies of an application including bundles, plans, plan archives (PARs), and configurations, from both local and remote repositories.
Nimble uses OBR (or its own extended) repository indexes, to automatically deploy all dependent bundles needed to activate a target bundle (and uninstalls them when the target bundle is stopped). It can also detect other dependencies, such as a WAB bundle requires a web-extender and automatically install one according to a configurable policy.
Nimble can also be configured to launch Glassfish, so that its features are available to bundles in the Glassfish container.
The example below also shows that logging support is automatically installed when sshd is activated:
$ posh
________________________________________
Welcome to Paremus Nimble!
Type 'help' for help.
[denzil.0]% nim:add --dry-run com.paremus.posh.sshd@active
-- sorted parts to install --
4325 osgi.resolved.bundle/ch.qos.logback.core:0.9.22
-- start dependency loop --
5729 osgi.resolved.bundle/com.paremus.util.logman:1.0.23.SNAPSHOT
5727 osgi.active.bundle/com.paremus.util.logman:1.0.23.SNAPSHOT
3797 osgi.resolved.bundle/ch.qos.logback.classic:0.9.25.SNAPSHOT
3792 osgi.resolved.bundle/slf4j.api:1.6
-- end dependency loop --
436 osgi.resolved.bundle/org.apache.mina.core:2.0.0.RC1
6533 osgi.resolved.bundle/sshd-core:0.3
398 osgi.resolved.bundle/com.paremus.posh.sshd:1.0.23.SNAPSHOT
396 osgi.active.bundle/com.paremus.posh.sshd:1.0.23.SNAPSHOT
(disclaimer: I'm a developer at Paremus)
gogo is the new RFC147 standard command-line shell. It is already used in Felix, Karaf, Nimble and will soon be available in Glassfish.
Gogo allows you to run any commands that you could type interactively, as a script. So you could generate the list of bundles to install and convert it to a script, or even capture the installed bundles from a working configuration so that it can be re-created from a clean start.