Appendix A. Spring DM development with Eclipse
Eclipse is a free integrated development environment (IDE). It’s written in Java and was intended primarily for developing Java applications. The Eclipse platform is also extensible because it provides an advanced plug-in framework. The range of provided plug-ins is quite large, with plug-ins being available for many languages including C, C++, COBOL, Python, Perl, and PHP.
Eclipse is particularly suitable for OSGi development because it is based internally on this technology. The Eclipse IDE is built on Equinox, an OSGi 4 implementation that extends the specification with various extension points. Developing Eclipse plug-ins corresponds to creating extended OSGi components. Because Eclipse allows you to develop OSGi applications, implementing Spring DM applications is also possible.
Using Eclipse to develop OSGi and Spring DM applications requires some setup to enable the plug-in development environment and provide Spring DM components access to the embedded OSGi environment. You need to install the plug-ins required for OSGi and Spring DM development and configure the OSGi environment.