We just finished a project using DM Server 2.0 and were not very impressed with the state of things, not to mention that we ultimately want to be able to deploy to different application servers like Websphere and JBoss. We are switching to Felix and plan on embedding it in a WAR file and using the servlet bridge to forward requests to our HTTP services. For development and debugging, we will probably just use Eclipse to launch the Felix framework directly and forego the embedding in a WAR file - that seems like it would prevent a lot of headaches.
My main question is on how to best work with Felix from a development standpoint (some of this is more OSGi bundle specific, so please bear with me). We use Eclipse and have been using Maven for our build, but our developers are a little frustrated by the POM-first manifest generation model, and I wanted to find out what the "best practices" are for Felix users. I would like to use PDE for our development, because that seems to be a lot simpler for our developers to grasp (we have a lot of experience building Eclipse plugins). If we use PDE can we still use Maven to build, with the caveat that we will have to keep our POM's and manifests in sync manually? Or is there more involved that will require us to use the PDE Build system (we're not creating features or RCP apps or anything, just straight OSGi bundles)? What are most of you all doing to make Eclipse/Maven/Felix play well together?
