MDM development bundle repository

All of the necessary third party bundles have been placed in a bundle repository for you.

Once you’ve set up your development environment and the development bundle repository, you will find the bundle repository in the Bundle Repositories view in RSA/RAD as shown in this topic.

These are the third-party bundles that are being used by physical MDM and virtual MDM. Having defined the bundle repository, and added the bundles to it, these bundles are now available in your development environment. The packages that they export can be imported and used by any bundle that needs to use them.

A development bundle repository is used for development only. The development bundle supplies you with packages in shared bundles that you can import and use as you develop your application. When you compile your application, the compiler will reference the bundles from the repository. There are two ways you make these bundles available to your application at runtime:
  • By adding shared bundles to the EBA
  • By adding shared bundles to the IBM® WebSphere® Application Server bundle repository

Adding shared bundles to the EBA

You can incorporate repository bundles in your application EBA so that when you deploy the EBA onto IBM WebSphere Application Server, those bundles continue to be available because they are inside the EBA. If you include the bundles you’re developing, your application will not deploy.

To include the shared bundles in your EBA when you export the InfoSphere® MDM application as an EBA, you choose to include the bundles pulled in from the bundle repository. However, including those third party JAR files into your application ties them to your application, which means that only your application has access to them.

In your development environment, the core bundles and the EBA are projects in MDM Workbench. The bundle repository is defined in the bundle repository view, and the EBA lists the bundles that it contains. This includes both core and shared bundles. When the EBA is deployed to the IBM WebSphere Application Server OSGi container, the shared bundles are added to the EBA; that is, they are physically in the EBA file that is generated and deployed onto the IBM WebSphere Application Server Runtime Configuration.

If you are working in MDM Workbench, you will have the core bundles as projects in your development environment. In the OSGI bundle repositories view, you will see the Bundle Repository that your EBA needs. However, when they get deployed in the EBA onto IBM WebSphere Application Server for testing, they will include the shared bundles in that EBA’s deployment assembly.

Adding shared bundles into a IBM WebSphere Application Server bundle Repository

Alternatively, you can also add that same bundle repository that you used for development and install it as a runtime bundle repository in IBM WebSphere Application Server. Doing so makes the bundles in that repository sharable by any applications that need them.

In your development environment, the core bundles and the EBA are projects in MDM Workbench. The bundle repository is defined in the bundle repository view, and the EBA lists the bundles that it contains. This includes only core bundles. When the EBA is deployed to the IBM WebSphere Application Server OSGi container, the shared bundles must already be there in the IBM WebSphere Application Server shared bundle repository before the EBA can be deployed and started.