Going from Plugin to OSGi bundle

The plugin framework supports multiple types of plugins ranging from built-in plugins that are little more than an XML file to fully-fledged OSGi-based plugins.

For version 2 plugins that are deployed into the internal OSGi container, as a plugin author you can ignore all the OSGi trappings and just provide a JAR containing the atlassian-plugin.xml descriptor file.

The Atlassian Plugin Framework 2 tries to hide the complexity of OSGi as much as possible, especially for simple plugins that do not have dependencies on other plugins. However, since version 2 plugins will be deployed on OSGi, they need to be transformed into an OSGi bundle that the OSGi container understands. The Atlassian Plugin Framework has a built-in way of transforming plugin JARs into fully-fledged OSGi bundles.

INFO: If you are familiar with OSGi and want to provide an OSGi bundle directly in order to leverage all its features, you are free to do so.

Converting a Plugin into an OSGi Bundle

The following diagram describes the process by which a plugin JAR is dynamically loaded and, at the end of the process flow, transformed into an OSGi bundle.

Managing Dependencies Automatic Generation of Spring Configuration Plugin Framework