Ben

Merry Christmas too! Thanks for your help. The problem ultimately was the way I was building the war with Maven. It didn't take the MANIFEST.MF from the exploded war directory. Instead it wanted to create a dynamic MANIFEST.MF when jaring up the war file. A configuration tag solved the problem. So the WAR was deploying as a 'legacy' war and didn't have the GWT jars packed inside it. Of course, DM Server treated it as a WAR since it didn't know it was trying to be a bundle. So it didn't resolve the GWT module in the repository/bundles/usr directory!

Maybe there is an OSGi aware maven plugin. It would be cool if it automatically built a correct MANIFEST.MF based on dependencies defined in the POM. Or alternatively maybe Spring will build plugins for IntelliJ?

Anyway, thanks again. Hope your Christmas was a great one

Ted

Happy Christmas! As Joris said, the GWT bundle doesn't do anything in itself, it's a dependency of the WAR file (in this blog) and of some other bundles in Part 3. So you can think of it as getting lazy-loaded out of the bundles/usr directory when it's needed.

Ben

Any thoughts?

Thanks for the excellent tutorial. I don't use eclipse so I can't take advantage of the plugins for dm server. So I downloaded the 'bundleized' GWT module you linked to. However, when I drop that into the directory /repository/bundles/usr it doesn't seem to be loading up. I telnet and give the ss command and there is no gwt bundle listed. I've checked the trace.log files and I don't see anything fishy. I'm running dm server 1.0.1 on OS X with jdk 1.6.0_07.

I will try with the eclipse plugins but it seems to me I should be able to drop the bundle into the bundles directory and have it automatically loaded correct? Is there something explicit to do to get it to load the bundle?

Thanks,

Ted

To add to Ben's excellent response, I would recommend using Maven to not only address compile-time dependency management, but also for building the GWT sources into a WAR file. I have a recent post at my blog addressing this issue specifically: http://www.christianposta.com/blog

Hope this helps.

The tutorials (including the third one coming soon) don't really address the issue of GWT and Spring integration, mostly because I wanted to keep them focussed to the specific topics of dm Server, OSGi and GWT. You'll see in blog 3 that we use the GWT servlet with a ServletFilter to bridge the gap between the Spring-managed beans and the GWT world. Hopefully that will be helpful.

The question of integration between OSGi and Maven/Ivy is a very pertinent one. OSGi handles runtime dependencies and Maven/Ivy handle build-time dependencies. Often this is going to mean the same thing, but not necessarily always. Currently the way it works is that dependencies are expressed in two places – a MANIFEST.MF for the bundle dependencies and a pom.xml for the build-time ones. Google around and you'll see a number of people coming up with integration solutions.

I agree with you that manually copying Javascript is no panacea of automated build nirvana. When experimenting in a build environment, it illustrates the limitations of the tools, in that the GWTCompiler target can't be flexibly configured. However, you have to run the compiler and you have to package up the output, which is not hugely different to a normal Java build process. So I would recommend you look at a tool like ant to drive GWTCompiler and package up the target directory.

Ben