Eclipse:osgiDS

Intro

Getting declarative services into Eclipse RCP was quite a fight but with the help of some fellows from the #eclipse irc channel I finally managed to get 'em up and running.

Prerequisites

First we need to get some missing plugins.
The declarative services spec is part of the services for OSGI R4 but it is not part of the equinox that is distributed with eclipse 3.3.
So we need to go here:[1]

• Under latest releases select 3.3.2
• Scroll down to "Incubator" bundles
• download org.eclipse.equinox.ds<whateverversionisthere>.jar (this is the declarative services plugin)
• download org.eclipse.equinox.cm<whateverversionisthere>.jar (this is the OSGI admin service)
• add the downlaoded packages to your plugins directory
• restart eclipse

How to get it into your RCP

Now comes the tricky part.