In the past PDE was exclusivly focused on the so called manifest-first aproach, that is you maintain your osgi-manifest by hand, but with the 2023-06 release PDE now supports a new code-first aproach where the manifest is generated automatically, but still retains the tools you know and allows even a mixed aproach for easy migration (no "big-bang" required).
While it has often proven to work for small scale bundles without many dependecies or changes to maintain the manifest manually, it is actually nothing made for humans, it was made for the OSGi framework to easily gather required information for the resoloution process. It is therfore easy to getting things wrong, cumbersome to maintain and even if PDE supports a lot of automation not very comfortable on the long run. Especially with the recently defined OSGI standard annotation you now can specify literally anything you want in code much easier and closer to the place where you are working on, these automatically travel with any refactorings and you get nice autocompletion in the Eclipse IDE.
We will start the session with a short introduction to the usage of OSGi code annotations, summarize the current state and then head over to show how the new code-first apraoch in PDE can be used, how to convert existing projects and what things have to be considered in the transition phase of a project. Finally we will give an outsight to the upcomming features in that area.
