To date, Tycho has been my tool of choice for developing Domino-targeted Maven projects. However, it's not without protest.. Unlike most Maven plugins, Tycho inserts itself at the very start of the build process and takes over dependency management. Purely in Maven, you can use normal Maven dependencies, but only so long as you're pointing to a dependency that already has OSGi metadata (which, fortunately, most do), and only then to satisfy a Require-Bundle or Import-Package that also has to be present. This gets more annoying, though, when dealing with Eclipse, which removes the notion of Maven dependencies entirely when using Tycho and forces you to jump through hoops to do what you want. And, as a final kicker, Tycho's p2 repository support is completely broken in the latest release version of Maven.

So why do I keep using it, anyway?

Well, it brings a couple major benefits that are of particular importance for Domino:

• It can use p2 repositories for dependencies. This matters because the XPages runtime plugins are not (yet?) available as normal Maven dependencies. Years back, IBM [provided a "Build Management" update site](https://openntf.org/main.nsf/project.xsp?r=project/IBM Domino Update Site for Build Management), which is helpful, but it's still an Eclipse-style p2 repository, not a Maven repository. Tycho can use p2 repositories natively, though, just as Eclipse does.
• It constructs a true Equinox environment. This matters both when compiling your project and when running automated tests. The environment created by Tycho is the same Equinox OSGi runtime that Domino uses, and so it supports the same styles of bundle resolution and extensions that you get in Domino. Without this happening during the build, you lose some assurance that things at runtime will match your expectations.
• It spawns tests in a separate process. This is a little esoteric, but it matters because launching a Notes environment on a non-Windows platform more-or-less requires setting up environment variables for the Notes/Domino directory and others, and these variables are not successfully set when using the normal maven-surefire-plugin runtime. This means that reliably running tests requires setting up the environment ahead of time, which is fiddlier and less automated.
• It can generate new- and old-style Eclipse Update Sites. To be used in Designer and NSF-based Update Sites, an OSGi project has to be packaged up into a p2 repository along with an old-style "site.xml" file. Tycho can generate these (and can be assisted with "site.xml" when using the newer style), and it can also auto-generate source bundles, features, and repositories.

Alternatives and Workarounds

Some of the "hard" requirements for Tycho can be at least worked around.

Years ago, I wrote a Ruby script that would take a p2 site like IBM's or one generated from a newer version and "Mavenize" it by creating artifact information based on each bundle's OSGi manifest. I since converted it to Java and included it in Darwino's Studio plugins, and yesterday added it to the generate-domino-update-site Maven plugin. Using that lets you declare dependencies on any of the bundles or embedded JARs in a normal Maven project:

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        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.ibm.xsp</groupId>
            <artifactId>com.ibm.notes.java.api.win32.linux</artifactId>
            <version>[10.0.0,)</version>
            <classifier>Notes</classifier>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>

This isn't perfect, since it's neither standardized nor generally available (go vote for the aha idea!), but at least it's reproducible and can be something of a de-facto standard if used enough.

Then there's the matter of generating appropriate OSGi metadata. Outside of the Tycho-using world, the main way that generating this is via a tool called bnd and its related tools. bnd is kind of a parallel world and there's even an alternate tooling set for Eclipse instead of the default PDE. There are a couple ways to use bnd in a Maven build, but the one I'm familiar with to date is the maven-bundle-plugin. I've used this with Darwino to incidentally create OSGi metadata for the otherwise non-OSGi core modules, and I suspect that it gets used heavily this way. It's more powerful than that, though, and is a nice wrapper for bnd under the hood, supporting Declarative Services annotations and all the other OSGi goodies. In my case, I used it to generate the MANIFEST.MF with most of the defaults, but then added in some specifics to play nice in my Domino Equinox target.

I suspect that these bnd-based tools can also be a route to solving my automated-testing woes. For the Open Liberty Runtime project, I don't have to worry about that, since it's so dependent on running in actual Domino that the return-on-investment for setting up JUnit tests wouldn't be worth it. However, I recall seeing some Maven testing plugin that let you spawn an OSGi environment of your choice, and I think that something like that may be able to replace Tycho for me there.

Since p2 repositories/update sites are entirely an Eclipse-ism, most OSGi tooling doesn't care about them. That's where p2-maven-plugin comes in. Not only will it allow you to create p2 repositories, but it lets you define features in the configuration, meaning they don't have to be separate modules like in Tycho. And not only that, but it will also auto-OSGi-ify any Maven dependencies you bring in if they don't already have OSGi bundle information. It also lets you override existing bundle data on the fly if needed, such as if the dependencies and imports conflict with something on Domino.

Eclipse Friendliness

Since I still use Eclipse to develop these projects, I want to be able to make use of the [XPages SDK](https://openntf.org/main.nsf/project.xsp?r=project/XPages SDK for Eclipse RCP)'s ability to run Domino's HTTP stack pointed at my active workspace. For that to work, I need to be able to get Eclipse to recognize my projects as functional PDE-compatible bundles even if I'm not using PDE for them. Fortunately, that process isn't difficult: once I set the location for MANIFEST.MF to be in "META-INF" in the project root, maven-bundle-plugin started generating the files there instead of within "target", and Eclipse started working with the projects as OSGi bundles. The only thing left to do then was to gitignore the generated files, since they don't need to be checked into source control anymore.

Future Improvements

The big thing that is still an open problem is dealing with testing. I have some ideas for taking a swing at it, but for now it's the main thing preventing me from doing this for all of my Tycho projects.

Beyond that, I want to look a bit into bnd-maven-plugin. This diverges from maven-bundle-plugin in that it's geared towards using bnd configuration files directly. During the build process, I think the results would be the same, since maven-bundle-plugin can already pass through whatever configuration I want, but it would be a better match for the Eclipse bndtools tooling. Additionally, externalizing the bnd config files would mean they'd be the same if I decided to switch to Gradle, as Open Liberty uses.

Finally, and specific to this Open Liberty project, I may want to consider using bnd to generate Liberty Feature manifests, as it itself does. These features are implemented as OSGi "subsystems" packaged .esa files. Currently, I'm using esa-maven-plugin to generate their specialized manifests, but I've already hit some limitations in the area of cross-feature dependencies. Apparently, bnd takes some wrangling to suit this, but is worth it. I'll consider that one a "stretch goal", though.

For now, I'm pretty pleased with the new setup. The projects still work on Domino, I can run them on there from the workspace, I was able to eliminate the p2 feature projects outright, and now I don't have to worry about packaging up a dependencies site just to have something to point at in Eclipse. Heck, I can even use Visual Studio Code now! It's pretty nice.