Pure OSGi only uses information from the JAR's (i.e. bundle's) MANIFEST.MF. It is the Eclipse plugin registry which uses XML. The schema for plugin.xml is well defined. In fact, extension points are partly expressed as XSD so that people implementing extensions can validate their declaration.
So the disadvantage JSON would have is lack of validation. Cheers, Chris 2009/3/26 Greg Brown <[email protected]> > >Sure, I know what annotations are =) but I was wondering how you saw them > >being used? Do you have an example in your mind? > > Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you were unaware of how annotations work > - I was actually just attempting to describe how I thought it might work. > :-) From a very high level, it seems like annotations could easily be used > as a replacement for embedding XML configuration information in a JAR > file... > > >I'm not so sure they are appropriate in this case. In Eclipse an > extension > >point isn't always related to some Java code. For instance, in Eclipse > you > >can configure perspectives and menu items declaratively in the plugin.xml. > >Attaching code to them is optional. In fact ( with regards to building > the > >UI anyway) most of the time, you would only provide Java code where you > >really need to specialise something. > > ...but this is a good point. Do you think there might be an advantage to > using JSON over XML? Does OSGi actually require XML? > > >Eclipse RCP provides a lot of functionality out of the box... > >I see Pivot much more free-form that that, but I think I can still see the > >value in providing an OSGi based 'Kernel'. > > Agreed. In general, we try to provide as much functionality as we can to > the developer, but we don't want to overdesign things. > > >
