Chapter 9. IDE development tools
This chapter covers
- OSGi development with Eclipse PDE
- The bndtools Eclipse plug-in
- Eclipse Libra
- Other Eclipse plug-ins for enterprise OSGi
- OSGi support in NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA
At the beginning of chapter 8, we mentioned that whichever build tool you choose, you’ll probably want to use it in concert with a complementary IDE. What choices do you have for IDEs? Do any of them offer special support for enterprise OSGi? The good news is that there’s rich support for OSGi in development tools, and support for enterprise OSGi is growing.
Your decision about which set of IDE tools to use will partly be determined by whether you prefer a code-first or manifest-first development style, and which build tools you’re using. On the other hand, you may already have an IDE in mind, and that might determine your choice of build tools! Figure 9.1 shows one possible route to making a decision about which IDE to use—but feel free to work from right to left instead if you already know which IDE you want to use.