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  • What is bnd?

    “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
    ― R. Buckminster Fuller

    bnd is the engine behind a number of popular software development tools that support OSGi. It can be found in several maven plugins, ant, gradle, and of course Eclipse (bndtools). It actively seeks other build tool vendors to use bnd to improve the quality of the generated OSGi metadata.

    bnd actually consists of 2 major parts, one part is really good in creating a JAR with OSGi meta data based on instructions and the information in the class files. Over time bnd has collected hundreds of heuristics that provide for good bundles. This part is therefore often used in build tools like maven or gradle that already generate JARs. They mainly use the manifest generation features of bnd.

    The other part is a IDE/build tool independent model of a workspace with projects. This was the result of the frustration that certain things could be done very well in Eclipse but that other things are best done in a command line tool. Since IDEs are incremental and very event driven, command line tools tend to run everything from start to end. What was needed was an independent model that could work with Eclipse, maven, ant, gradle, and hopefully one day Intellij.

    So to use bnd, look at the the descriptions of the tools that include bnd. Then when you want to find out what a certain command does, or how to call a macro, then use this manual.

  • How to get started?

  • Table of contents

    1. Introduction
    2. How to install bnd
    3. Guided Tour
    4. Guided Tour Workspace & Projects
    5. Concepts
    6. Best practices
    7. Build
    8. Generating JARs
    9. Versioning
    10. Baselining
    11. Service Components
    12. Metatype
    13. Contracts
    14. Manifest Annotations
    15. Resolving Dependencies
    16. Launching
    17. Testing
    18. Packaging Applications
    19. Wrapping Libraries to OSGi Bundles
    20. From the command line
    21. For Developers
    22. Plugins
    23. Tools bound to bnd
    24. Header Reference
    25. Instruction
    26. Instruction Index
    27. Macro Reference
    28. Macro Index
    29. Command Reference
    30. Plugins Reference
    31. Settings
    32. Errors
    33. Warnings
    34. Frequently Asked Questions
    • Contact
    • Developers
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