Hello *, I'm new to Felix but use Eclipse already for a few years. Equinox supports so-called buddy-class-loading. Does Felix have such a feature, too? If so, how is it named? I looked for "felix buddy class loading", but didn't find anything. Is it maybe simply called differently?
If it is not clear to you, what I mean by "buddy class loading", imagine you have two plugins: my.bundle.a and my.bundle.b. my.bundle.a contains a framework and my.bundle.b some implementation for it. Thus, my.bundle.b would define a dependency on my.bundle.a (to import the interfaces that are provided by the framework), but my.bundle.a would know nothing about my.bundle.b. There are situations (especially when integrating non-OSGi-aware systems into an OSGi context), when the framework in my.bundle.a wants to instantiate a class from my.bundle.b, but this is not possible as there's no dependency in this direction. Thus, my.bundle.a would get a ClassNotFoundException when taking the class name (that was maybe somehow added to a configuration by my.bundle.b) and trying a Class.forName(...). Here comes buddy-class-loading into play: my.bundle.a would say that it supports it by the following entry in its MANIFEST.MF: Eclipse-BuddyPolicy: registered my.bundle.b would declare a dependency on my.bundle.b and say that its own classes should be available to my.bundle.a by having these two entries in its MANIFEST.MF: Require-Bundle: my.bunde.a Eclipse-RegisterBuddy: my.bunde.a The important thing is that my.bundle.a still does not reference my.bundle.b anywhere (the framework must of course not know any of its implementations), but is still able to load the (exported) classes from my.bundle.b. Further information about buddy class loading can be found here: https://www.jfire.org/modules/phpwiki/index.php/Buddy%20and%20remote%20classloading http://www.eclipsezone.com/articles/eclipse-vms/ Best regards, Marco :-)
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