How to auto-start/eager start OSGi services on Eclipse platform

Question

I develop an Eclipse RCP application which makes heavy use of OSGi bundles which provide services for later use. The use case requires the bundles to register their services

Answer 1

You can use the "org.eclipse.ui.startup" extension point in your plugin. This allows you to specify an IStartup class that will be called when the Eclipse UI starts up. As long as this is a class in your bundle then your bundle will be started.

It will mean including a plugin.xml file, and this would be specifically an Eclipse plugin rather than a standard OSGi bundle, but you could then use this plugin to activate any of your standard OSGi bundles.