If you are familiar with OSGi development you should already know Knopflerfish an open source OSGi Service Platform. Knopflerfish is an implementation of the OSGi R5 specifications and includes a set of Knopflerfish specific bundles and utilities. An overview of the distribution’s bundles is given here.

The most noteworthy of that additional bundles is the Knopflerfish OSGi Desktop. The desktop is a GUI application that gives a graphical overview of the running OSGi instance. From within the desktop bundles can be started, stopped updated or installed. Additional bundle and service detail information is shown.

The desktop is based on two standard OSGi bundles using Swing without any further dependencies. So it can easily be integrated in Equinox based projects (e.g. RCP applications). The Maven repository and coordinates for that bundles are:

     <repository><url>http://www.knopflerfish.org/maven2/</url></repository>

     <groupId>org.knopflerfish.bundle</groupId>
     <artifactId>desktop</artifactId>
     <version>5.0.1</version>

     <groupId>org.knopflerfish.bundle</groupId>
     <artifactId>desktop-API</artifactId>
     <version>5.0.1</version>

To show the desktop start the org.knopflerfish.bundle.desktop bundle either via autostart in your launch configuration or programmatically at runtime:

    Bundle bundle = Platform.getBundle("org.knopflerfish.bundle.desktop");
    if (bundle.getState() == Bundle.RESOLVED){
        bundle.start(Bundle.START_TRANSIENT);
    }