title: Working with Maven, OSGi and Bndtools
body: <p>Today I was asked whether it is a good idea to use Maven in our current OSGi application. We used Bndtools and its great since it makes development as easy as possible. Bndtools uses OBR to maintain other bundles and dependency resolution even during the application is running.</p>
  
  <p>Since Maven is widely spreading around and is so popular, mostly all try to use it in OSGi environments too. For me these are two different approaches. OSGi has a its own declaration of dependencies, the MANIFEST.MF and Maven a pom, where you can declare them. So if you use both of them, you will declare dependencies two times. Of course you can use the Apache OSGi Maven Plugin to avoid it and Maven is responsible for creating the MANIFEST.MF. BUT Maven Repositories do not really care about bundles. So it CAN happen that you are referencing to a non bundle jar.</p>
  
  <p>Of course, there are advantages using Maven, but is it really a good thing to combine it with OSGi or specially with Bndtools?</p>
  
  <p>Could somebody provide advantages or disadvantages! Has someone practical experience with using both?</p>