Should I use POM first or MANIFEST first when developing OSGi application with Maven?

Question

There are two main approaches when developing an OSGi application with Maven: POM-first and MANIFEST first.

I\'m looking for an answer that is in a form of a table t

Answer 1

I think you should choose by use case. For server side OSGi projects I favour the pom first style. It nicely matches the maven builds and is much less error prone than Manifest first. In fact bnd which is behind the maven bundle plugin gets the Manifest right for most cases without any additional config. The trick is to use some naming rules. For example if you name internal package impl or internal the will not be exported. Using this style you can not use the Eclipse plugin perspective (at least without bndtools which I do not like) but I did not yet miss this perspective. I am a developer in the Apache Karaf, CXF and Camel projects where we use this style and it works great. Especially for CXF and Camel it is great that we can support OSGi and non OSGi deployments with the same build and tools.

For Eclipse RCP applications Manifest first is the way to go as you need the plugin perspective and the Eclipse IDE tools. If you want to combine that with maven then tycho is probably the way to go.