If you are using OSGi then give Pax Exam a try

Pax Exam is a great piece of work! It makes it super easy to write JUnit4 tests which can then be run in multiple OSGi containers like Felix & Equinox using the exact bundles you require - plus it lets you inject BundleListener and so forth. Here's the tutorial which should get you started pretty quick.

I recently added an OSGi integration test to Apache Camel, here's the test case if you're interested. Notice how the versions of the bundles added to Felix and Equinox are not mentioned in this test case - they are inherited from the pom.xml from Maven.

The depends-maven-plugin from ServiceMix Kernel (soon to be Apache Karaf) generates the file target/classes/META-INF/maven/dependencies.properties which Pax Exam can then use to resolve the version dependencies of groupId/artifactIds. This lets you keep all your version information in your pom.xml and avoid having to update all your test cases whenever your pom.xml changes - keeping things nice and DRY!

Great stuff Pax-folks, keep up the good work!

Apache ServiceMix Kernel 1.0.0 released!

via Guillaume's post

Apache ServiceMix Kernel 1.0.0 has just been released.

Apache ServiceMix Kernel is a small OSGi based runtime which provides
a lightweight container onto which various bundles can be deployed.
Amongst the list of supported features, Apache ServiceMix Kernel supports:

• hot deployment of OSGi bundles, exploded bundles or custom artifacts (spring xml configuration files support is provided)
  
• services configuration stored as property files are monitored and provided as standard OSGi configurations
  
• a centralized logging back end supported by Log4J, ServiceMix Kernel supports a number of different APIs (JDK 1.4, JCL, SLF4J, Avalon, Tomcat, OSGi)
• provisioning of libraries or applications can be done using simple commands via simple xml descriptors
  
• native OS integration as a service so that the lifecycle will be bound to your Operating System.
  
• an extensible shell console to manage services, applications and libraries
• operations on the console can be done remotely via a secured and encrypted channel
  
• a security framework based on JAAS
• new instances can be created using a single command line

This release, with the detailed release notes, is available at:
http://servicemix.apache.org/kernel/servicemix-kernel-100.html.

I'm particularly pleased to get the 1.0.0 release out; it makes it really easy to have hot-redeployable Camel routing rules - just edit your Spring XML when using the expanded bundle mode and ServiceMix will auto-redeploy your routing rules dynamically!