Setting up Spring Dynamic Modules (OSGi) with Eclipse – A step-by-step tutorial

I spend some time playing with Spring Dynamic Modules (Spring-DM) and Eclipse (resp. its underlying OSGi platform Equinox) the other day. I had some minor annoyances in the beginning concerning the initial setup, since i didn’t found any comprehensible source on the web on what bundles are needed at least and what else is necessary in order to run your own Spring-DM-ified bundles.

The following instructions will show you all the steps you have to accomplish in order to set up a minimalistic workspace in eclipse for creating or droping in and executig arbitrary Spring-DM bundles.
Note, that this post will only show you the necessary steps for a setup – it’s by way no tutorial about how to build bundles with Spring-DM (maybe in a future post) or about OSGi at all.

conditional breakpoints in eclipse

ever debugged through code that processed items of a huge collection?
but you are only interested in the processing of one specific collection?

never mind – there are good news!
Eclipse offers the chance to define conditional breakpoints, that is to specify a condition under which the breakpoint will suspend, if and only if that condition will become true (or alternatively, everytime the condition changes).

my favorite eclipse shortcuts for code browsing

‘you have to have a set of tools, which you should use without any breakdowns’ i once read a sentence in the manner of the above in ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’.

for most developers eclipse is such a tool, so for me. here are some of my favorite shortcuts which helped me to keep my fingers on the keyboard when browsing through the code …

search and replace with regular expressions in eclipse

eclipse supports regular expressions within his dialog ‘search and replace’ (ctrl-f). you only have to activate the corresponding checkbox ‘Regular Expressions’ in the options pane.

let’s see eclipse in action by a simple example. suppose you want to surround a couple of numbers with some text: