Embed OSGi to Monolithic Application as a Dynamic Plugin Mechanism

Eclipse Equinox is used as OSGi framework.

Run Equinox as a standalone application

Read Equinox tutorial.

C:\eclipse\plugins>java -jar org.eclipse.osgi_3.3.0.v20070530.jar -console

osgi> install file:d:\documents\temp\plugins\org.silentsquare.osgi.test.bundle.h
elloworld_1.0.0.jar
Bundle id is 1

osgi> ss

Framework is launched.

id      State       Bundle
0       ACTIVE      org.eclipse.osgi_3.3.0.v20070530
1       INSTALLED   org.silentsquare.osgi.test.bundle.helloworld_1.0.0

osgi> start 1
Hello World!

osgi> ss

Framework is launched.

id      State       Bundle
0       ACTIVE      org.eclipse.osgi_3.3.0.v20070530
1       ACTIVE      org.silentsquare.osgi.test.bundle.helloworld_1.0.0

osgi> close

Goodbye World!

Startup Equinox programmatically

See this blog article: "Starting Equinox from a Java application".

With org.eclipse.osgi_3.x.x.jar on classpath, which is just an ordinary jar file plus extra OSGi information, the code looks like

public class App {
   public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
       String[] equinoxArgs = {"-console"};
 BundleContext context = EclipseStarter.startup(equinoxArgs,null);
 Bundle bundle = context.installBundle("http://www.eclipsezone.com/files/jsig/bundles/HelloWorld.jar");
       bundle.start();
 for (Bundle b : context.getBundles()) {
     System.out.println(b);
 }
   }
}

The next step would be to build Grimoires XMLView over OSGi and implement each pair of translators as OSGi bundle. But classloading could be tricky: translators need to use classes in Grimoires. How?