NetBeans Module System and OSGi are kind of similar. They provide a way how to write modular systems, they encode their metadata in MANIFEST.MF, etc. This page has been create to host the "alignment" effort, e.g. ideas, plans and other work that could lead to crossing the gap and making the system even more similar, potentially replaceable.
All of this started when Richard S. Hall told me that he is a NetBeans IDE user, but the fact that NetBeans cannot run inside of Felix makes him look bad inside his own community. He said that he would like to try to port NetBeans and I thought, ok, that is not bad idea. If anyone wants to try it, we (I mean Sun employees working on NetBeans) are not going to stop you. In fact we are even able to give you some advices. This page contains the advices we gathered so far.
Can Felix recognize modules in the current NetBeans locations. E.g. platformX/modules/ or ideY/modules, etc. If that would be doable, then good, we do not need to do any changes to the layout.
It depends on what you mean to "recognize" them, but if I understand what you mean, then I think we have a couple of options:
Last thing related to this is classpath. Currently NetBeans contain three JARs that are on classpath (platform/lib/*.jar) and two that are treated in a special way (platform/core/*.jar). I guess that in your proposal, you would like to treat these as modules. Felix would be on classpath, all NetBeans JARs would be loaded dynamically completely under control of Felix.
It is not 100% necessary to have everything in a module, but that is probably better. The OSGi framework allows you to put stuff on the class path too. There are two ways for modules to access classes on the class path:
So, it is probably better if everything is in a module, but it is not strictly required. Ok, let's try to make everything a module/bundle.
Can OSGi mimic implementation dependencies? E.g. bundle dependency when the other bundle sees even non-exported packages from the other one?
To be clear, my vision is one where we create a "NetBeans-like module layer" on top of OSGi, so that NetBeans modules are not impacted in general.
Do you want to write a tool that will enhance NetBeans manifests to OSGi understandable ones?
As for the tool, the Ant task to patch is here: JarWithModuleAttributes JarWithModuleAttributesTest