Bundle Activator Wizard

Building bundles using SAT involves creating subclasses of the BaseBundleActivator class. While this is certainly not complicated, it is made easier with the help of the Bundle Activator Wizard.

The Bundle Activator Wizard creates a bundle activator by subclassing BaseBundleActivator and generates skeleton code based on selections made by the user.

Using the Bundle Activator Wizard involves the following steps:

  1. Create a Plug-in Project: A bundle is created using the PDE's Plug-in Project type. A new project should be created for each new bundle you wish to create. Convention dictates that the project's name should be set to that of the bundle's Bundle-SymbolicName.
  2. Writing the Application Code: This is the Java application code that will reside in the bundle. This code typically has no dependency upon the OSGi framework. While it is not necessary to have all the code written before the bundle activator is created, the application model code is typically written to some degree first.
  3. Creating a Bundle Activator: From the workbench menu bar choose File > New > Other.... From the dialog box, expand the Service Activator Toolkit folder then choose Bundle Activator. Finally click Next > to open the wizard. The wizard consists of 4 pages, each of which asks the user to enter information about the bundle that they are building. The last page of the wizard presents a preview of the code that will be generated when the Finish button is clicked.
  4. Updating the Bundle's Dependencies: After creating a bundle activator the bundle will likely be referencing additional packages and it will be necessary to update the bundle's manifest to reflect these new dependencies. It is therefore always necessary to open the Manifest Editor, turn to the Dependencies page and update the Required Bundles and/or Imported Packages sections. It is highly recommended that the Manifest Editor's Automated Management of Dependencies section be used to compute these new dependencies.

The following pages describe the Bundle Activator Wizard pages in detail.

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