[news.eclipse.technology.riena] force OSGi Bundles to start

[Christian Campo <christian.campo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I recently came accross a problem that I am not sure what a good solution would be. In Riena we fiddle a lot around with 
OSGI services rather than using extensions.

The scenario is like this:

Bundle A defines a interface
Bundle B has a class that implements that interface and registers this implementation as OSGi service. This is done in 
the start method of the Activator of that bundle
Bundle C tries to find any registered service for the interface in A.

Now obviously C has (intentionally) no dependency to B. Our observation is that Bundle B stays as <<LAZY>> or
as RESOLVED, since no one accesses any class in there. Accessing a class could start that bundle if I had the right 
property in my MANIFEST.MF but hence no class is accessed it does not start.

In the past we tried to use our own config.ini (rather then the generated one) and put Bundle B on a lower level which 
sometimes had the desired effect. We also tried to start our application with the type OSGI Framework rather than 
Eclipse application. There you can also in the UI of the IDE specify start levels.

However at the end of the day we also like Riena to work in launch configurations of type Eclipse applications or Junit 
Plugin tests where we can't modify startlevels. If we are not missing a very obvious point it seems a little odd.

The last step we took, which worked quit well but is not a standard was to add a new property to the MANIFEST.MF. We 
called that one "Riena-Forcestart" and if set to true, the Activator in the Riena core bundle (which is always started) 
calls the Bundles start method that has this attribute. This way any bundle (that you can modify) can be forced to start.

Anyone else out there with a better solution ? Please tell us !!

regards
christian campo