Today I released version 2.2.0 of the maven-bundle-plugin from Apache Felix. This release may look like a minor update because it only contains two fixes, but one of them is very important. The workhorse behind the maven-bundle-plugin, Peter Kriens' bnd tool, has been upgraded from 0.0.384 to 1.15.0. The new version is much smarter in deciding which packages to export and import, and supports easy creation of Web Archive Bundles (WABs) which can act both as bundles and standard WAR files. Add numerous other small improvements and fixes to the mix and this should result in a much better experience overall.
Special mention should be made of the efforts of Juven Xu and Peter Kriens who worked together to add Nexus OSS staging to Peter's Ant build. Previously bnd artifacts were manually uploaded by occasional third-party requests to MAVENUPLOAD, often a very laborious process. Third-party uploads to Maven Central have since been streamlined and automated with Nexus, but OSS hosting is still preferred by project owners who want to stage and check artifacts as part of their regular build process.
On behalf of all the OSGi developers who use the maven-bundle-plugin I'd like to thank Juven and Peter for their work getting the latest versions of bnd onto Maven Central!
![Picture of Stuart McCulloch](https://www.sonatype.com/hubfs/stuart%20m.jpeg)
Written by Stuart McCulloch
Stuart is a Senior Software Engineer at Sonatype, working on Guice/OSGi integration, amongst other things.