Setting up Eclipse for Spring Dynamic Modules development

This quick guide will take you through the steps necessary to create Spring Dynamic Modules development environment using Eclipse IDE
It assumes that Subversion client and Maven are installed and configured on your machine.

Check out the Spring-DM project

Create directory where you want to check the project out and navigate to it.
Example:

> mkdir spring-dm-dev
> cd spring-dm-dev

Check out the project:
Example:

> svn co https://springframework.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/springframework/spring-osgi/trunk spring-osgi

This will check out the Spring Dynamic Modules project into spring-osgi directory

Build project

Navigate to the directory where you checked out the project

>cd spring-osgi/

Build the project using Eclipse Equinox profile. The other available profiles are knoplerfish and felix. For more information on profiles refer to Maven documentation.

>mvn -P equinox clean install

Make sure build is successfull.

Configure Eclipse

Start Eclipse and create a new workspace (you can use existing one if you want, but the new one will avoid potential issue carried over from the existing workspace)
Once Eclipse starts the workspace is being configured. We are going to assume the directory for your workspace is:
/Users/kermit/Dev/eclipse/workspaces/Spring-DM-setup

Now we need to prepare Eclipse to recognize Maven dependencies defined in .classpath file which point to M2_REPO directory
Execute the following command using maven eclipe plugin
mvn eclipse:configure-workspace -Declipse.workspace=<path to the workspace>
Example:

mvn eclipse:configure-workspace -Declipse.workspace=/Users/kermit/Dev/eclipse/workspaces/Spring-DM-setup

Restart Eclipse to pick up a new configuration

Import projects into Eclipse

Ironically, Spring Dynamic Modules project consists of several modules managed as separate Eclipse projects. In this step we will Import the core Spring-DM modules
Using Eclipse's "Import Existing Project into workspace" feature navigate to the directory where you checked out Spring-DM project and select the following project:

spring-osgi-annotation
spring-osgi-bundle-archetype
spring-osgi-core
spring-osgi-extender
spring-osgi-io
spring-osgi-mock
spring-osgi-test-support
spring-osgi-web
spring-osgi-web-extender

Follow the same procedure to import more project into your workspace (i.e., samples, etc).

Note: As you get more projects into your workspace, it is highly advisable to split projects into logical workind sets (see Eclipse documentation) for ease of management

Launching Equinox inside the Eclipse IDE

You can run any of the unit and integration tests in the source tree simply by choosing "run as..." -> "JUnit test" from the context menu. You can also configure Eclipse to start up Equinox using the Spring-OSGi bundles. Follow directions provided in this short tutorial

When you ready, start up equinox (you should see the "osgi>" prompt in the console window). Type 'ss' to see a short status summary of the bundles installed, and 'help' to get an overview of the commands available.