Calling all testers! Pax Construct v2 beta1

Well, we've finally completed the move to our new home and are slowly unpacking boxes "on-demand" :)

Meanwhile, back at OPS4J I've finished a major refactoring of the Pax Construct plugin and slimmed down the archetypes to produce a much leaner project layout. The more adventurous of you might like to try out the beta version:

http://repository.ops4j.org/maven2/org/ops4j/pax/construct/scripts/0.2.0-beta1/scripts-0.2.0-beta1.zip

Be warned - the usual beta disclaimers apply! Especially since the only machine I have with Windows is still packed away, and so all testing so far has been on my macbook using Ubuntu (my main development environment). Also, the docs are woefully out of date - at this moment the code is the best documentation, but you can use -h with any of the scripts to get basic usage.

Second warning: Pax Construct v2 is not compatible with projects created using older versions, but a script is being developed to migrate projects to the new layout. However you can use v2 to create and manage new projects.

Some highlights of v2:

• Transitive wrapping - you can choose to embed dependencies, or create further wrappers
• Transitive import - provided dependencies of imported bundles are automatically added
• Simple import management - the import list is maintained inside a single provision pom
• Optional generation of Eclipse project files - use "mvn clean install -Peclipse"
• Enhanced compilation - supports compiling against bundles with embedded jars
• Refactoring support - bundles can be moved around, poms will be created as necessary
• Improved maven mojos - can be used inside other poms to create projects for testing

Here's a couple of wrapping examples, which should be done inside a project created with pax-create-project - the first creates a bundle with embedded dependencies (use "mvn clean install" to build it) the second replaces it with a series of bundles, one per dependency:

pax-wrap-jar -g commons-logging -a commons-logging -v 1.1 -- -DembedTransitive

pax-wrap-jar -g commons-logging -a commons-logging -v 1.1 -- -DwrapTransitive -Doverwrite

A more complex example involving Spring-OSGi can be downloaded here:

Spring-OSGi deployment script (unix)
Spring-OSGi deployment script (windows)

Download the script for your OS, make sure the v2 scripts are in your path and run it - it should build and deploy a basic Spring-OSGi setup based on milestone 3, along with some wrappers and the weather sample. (note: it can take a few seconds to startup on Felix, the default framework)

There's a lot of cool stuff behind the scenes, and I'm starting on proper documentation for it this week. BTW, if you find any bugs with beta1 please raise them at http://issues.ops4j.org while I work on the docs :)