bundles, services, …

So I have progressed some more with my wonderings about the wonders of OSGI and implementing some basic stuff.

First off, I had a number of services I wanted to implement. I started with a number of bundles each implementing a service of its own. Making these work together was problematic in Felix due to problems with getting them to access each others functionality. I was getting really strange errors when using the services from another bundle. On the other hand, all the bundles and services worked just fine when deployed in Equinox. Putting all my services in one bundle made it work again in Felix and so I decided to do that. It actually makes sense as these services are closely related and use each other. So I guess this is actually in line with the concept of a bundle. A bundle makes for an abstraction to “bundle” together a number of services. This is similar to component vs service, where I see a component as hosting the implementation of one of more services. In any case, I guess hosting all the related services in one bundle really makes sense as this way they can all access the classes etc. of each other and are using the same classloader.