Pax runner eclipse plugin updatesite

Question

I'm having difficulties setting up Pax Runner Eclipse plugin so I can run Felix inside Eclipse.

I followed the instructions on https://ops4j1.jira.com/wiki/display/paxrunner/Plugin+Installation but looks like the updatesite (http://www.ops4j.org/pax/eclipse/update/) is unavailable.

I downloaded pax-runner-assembly-1.8.5-jdk15.zip from the public maven repo in an attempt of manually installing the plugin but I think I have a wrong file.

Which files do I need to download and where I should copy those files to (Eclipse plugins folder?)?

Answer 1

As far as I can tell from the documentation, the Pax (Curser) Eclipse plugin and the Pax Runner are different tools with different purposes. The pax-runner-assembly download seems to be a maven plugin/dependency. Pax Runner is used for provisioning (downloading and managing bundles) while the eclipse plugin adds the option to use different OSGI frameworks in the Eclipse OSGI run configuration.

According to the eclipse marketplace, the plugin hasn't been updated since 2009. There is kind of poor communication about what projects ares still maintained and which of the downloads you actually need to run use the tools. I'd say the eclipse plugin is dead and you'll probably be better of searching for plugins that add support for the specific OSGI framework you want to run.

Answer 2

The pax runner assembly you downloaded is for running pax runner as a standalone program -- it has sh and .bat files for executing it. It is not an Eclipse plugin. Furthermore, the one I initially downloaded didn't work with java 8 and used an old felix framework.

In order to run the standalone version on my system I had to download pax-runner from git and build from source:

 prompt# git clone https://github.com/ops4j/org.ops4j.pax.runner.git
 prompt# cd org.ops4j.pax.runner 
 prompt# mvn package

The standalone files will be in the pax-runner-assembly/target/pax-runnerXYZ.zip or .tar.gz.

I was able to start pax-runner using the latest felix framework (4.4.1) and in java 8.

In terms of the pax update site - yes, I had the same problem with eclipse not being able to find it. You may be able to build the plugin from source similar to building the standalone, but I have not tried that yet.

I am just starting to learn OSGI and not sure if people are using the ops4j pax software at all. Anyone with more experience care to chime in?

• chooks