Chapter 13. Launching and embedding an OSGi framework

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about creating, deploying, and managing bundles and services. Interestingly, you can’t do anything with these unless you have a running OSGi framework. For such an important and necessary topic, we’ve spent very little time discussing how precisely to achieve it. Not only is it necessary, but by learning to launch the framework, you’ll have the ability to create custom launchers tailored to your application’s needs. It even opens up new use cases, where you can use an instance of an OSGi framework inside an existing application or even embedded inside a bundle. Interesting stuff.

In this chapter, you’ll learn everything you need to know about launching the OSGi framework. To help you reach this goal, we’ll dissect the generic bundle launcher you’ve been using to run the book’s examples. You’ll also refactor the paint program to see how to embed a framework instance inside an existing application. Let’s get going.

13.1. Standard launching and embedding

13.2. Launching the framework

13.3. Embedding the framework

13.4. Summary