A.1. Building with Ant

Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org) is a build system for Java that uses XML to describe a tree of targets, where each target describes a sequence of tasks. Ant is extended by writing new tasks in Java, such as the bnd tool’s bnd task that can generate one or more bundles from a given class path. But what exactly is bnd?

A.1.1. Introducing the bnd tool

The bnd tool (www.aqute.biz/Code/Bnd) was written by Peter Kriens to take the pain out of developing bundles. Usually, when you create a JAR, you take a directory and archive its contents. This is fine for plain JARs, but it isn’t always ideal for OSGi bundles—there’s no easy way to tell if the OSGi manifest matches the contents or to quickly slice a large project class path into a consistent set of bundles.