The second project I took on this past week was related to the first, and also relates to my ongoing struggles with Tycho.

While working on the NSF ODP Tooling, I figured that it could be a good candidate to move away from Tycho and to maven-bundle-plugin or bnd directly. Since I've been Mavenizing the Domino OSGi bundles for a good while now, and the tooling doesn't have any OSGi-dependent tests in it, it seemed like it could go smoothly. Unlike historical precedent, though, my enemy in this endeavor wasn't Domino, but rather Eclipse.

Repository Layouts

One of the big things that makes working with OSGi bundles - at least specifically ones in the Eclipse style - difficult with Maven is that they're generally provided using a repository layout called "p2". This is the evolution of the "site.xml" Update Site style and shares a lot of characteristics. In fact, a p2 repository will often have a "site.xml" file alongside its "artifacts.xml" and "contents.xml" (often Jar'd up) to provide backwards compatibility. It's how we package up XPages plugins and how once upon a time IBM provided [the XPages artifacts for Tycho use](https://openntf.org/main.nsf/project.xsp?r=project/IBM Domino Update Site for Build Management). As a live example, Eclipse 2019-12 is distributed via such a repository.

Maven has its own repository layout, variously called "Maven", "Maven2", "m2", or just "default". This serves a similar purpose, but is structured differently - whereas p2 just has the repo and its "features" and "plugins" directory (and, potentially, composite repositories) - Maven's repository system is organized like a conceptual folder tree based on translating a Group ID (like, say, "org.openntf.maven") into a successive series of subdirectories (like "org/openntf/maven"), followed by a directory for an Artifact ID, which in turn contains directories for each version, and finally within there are any of the actual files that make up a given named "artifact". As a live example, Maven Central is browsable in this manner.

Translating Between Them

Though the two layouts share a common core job - hosting Jar files (mainly) - they diverge enough in how the tools expect the metadata to be laid out that they're difficult to mesh. Tools like bnd can often work with whatever, and even Tycho can try to find OSGi bundles via Maven dependencies, but it's not smooth.

Over time, a pseudo-standard of adding p2 repositories to Maven has emerged, but it's only actually used as a marker to pass along to true Eclipse tools. The most common in our sphere is this construct, seen in projects like ODA:

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<repository>
	<id>notes</id>
	<layout>p2</layout>
	<url>${notes-platform}</url>
</repository>

There, you reference the XPages update site somewhere, and then Tycho can use that to resolve dependencies for things like Require-Bundle: com.ibm.xsp.core. However, it's used only for Tycho's specific OSGi needs. You can't bring in the Tycho plugins and then have a non-Tycho module in your tree declare a dependency like that. Tycho has an implementation class for this, but it's intentionally stubbed out.

My Needs

The reason why tools that can work with both are so heavily slanted to the specific task of generating a true OSGi environment is that that's usually what you want. If you're designing, say, an Eclipse plugin or Eclipse-derived product, you want all of your tooling to know about OSGi from top to bottom, and that's where Tycho excels. It makes sure that all of your dependencies are correct and everything is OSGi-friendly.

This is as opposed to something like maven-bundle-plugin, which is most typically used to put an OSGi coat of paint on a project that isn't primarily geared towards OSGi.

I kind of want a middle ground, though. A project like the NSF ODP Tooling has grown into a sprawling hydra, with heads for Maven, Eclipse, Domino, and now Visual Studio Code. While that works, putting Tycho at the front of it ends up feeling needlessly proscriptive, and I'd love to toss it aside. However, I was blocked in my desire by a small thing: though Eclipse publishes their core bundles on Maven nowadays, Wild Web Developer is currently p2-only.

The Project

So I set out to solve this problem for myself and learn something in the process. As indicated by the <layout>p2</layout> option on the repository above, Maven's repository system is intended to be extensible. Unfortunately, it seems like it hasn't been extended particularly often in practice, and most of what I could find about it was that it's possible to do, but only via references to people saying that one could.

Fortunately, it turns out that it's actually not too difficult to implement after all, and I did just that.

What this Maven plugin does is allow you to specify p2 repositories in any old Maven project, using the ID of the repository you add as the Group ID of dependencies and then the Symbolic Name as the artifact ID. Now, with the plugin added to the project, I'm able to reference the p2-only Wild Web Developer artifact I need:

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<repositories>
	<repository>
		<id>org.eclipse.wildwebdeveloper</id>
		<url>https://download.eclipse.org/wildwebdeveloper/releases/0.8.0/</url>
		<layout>p2</layout>
	</repository>
</repositories>

<dependencies>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>org.eclipse.wildwebdeveloper</groupId>
		<artifactId>org.eclipse.wildwebdeveloper.xml</artifactId>
		<version>[0.5.0,)</version>
	</dependency>
</dependencies>

And, just like that, the bundle and its explicit dependencies show up in my Maven Dependencies group in Eclipse:

As a side bonus, this obviates the need for the mavenizeBundles half of the generate-domino-update-site project, since now I can just reference the generated site directly and get the dependencies, including with better behavior for embedded Jars than I had there:

The Tiny Details

I think that this plugin is about where it needs to be to suit my needs, but there is still an array of [tiny details I've yet to contend with](https://github.com/OpenNTF/p2-layout-provider/issues?q=is:open is:issue). It'll never be quite a perfect match for an arbitrary OSGi bundle (though some also contain useful Maven metadata), and so there will always be rough edges with something like this, but I think that it will solve a lot of headaches I'd otherwise have to deal with down the line.

If you think it'd be useful for your projects, take a look and let me know if you run into any trouble.