bnd - one tool to bnd them all!

- # 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. Plain JUnit Testing with OSGi (PRELIMENARY)
  18. Testing
  19. Packaging Applications
  20. Wrapping Libraries to OSGi Bundles
  21. Commands
  22. For Developers
  23. Tools bound to bnd
  24. Headers
  25. Instruction Reference
  26. Instruction Index
  27. Macro Reference
  28. Macro Index
  29. Plugins
  30. Settings
  31. Errors
  32. Warnings
  33. Frequently Asked Questions