Hi,

It has been a very long time since I last checked anything related to OSGi. We do not use that ourselves. The SDK jar is not a so called “OSGi bundle” (i.e. manifest within the jar doesn’t contain anything OSGi related, per internet https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/was-zos/9.0.5?topic=files-example-osgi-bundle-manifest-file it would have some special values). So if you use a tool that would assume such (or search is as such e.g. from the local maven cache), then it will fail.

So basically in this kind of situation, you will need to just use the SDK as a (any other) lib and make the “OSGi bundle” yourself and have the SDK as a dependency to that. However, be very careful that you do not repackage the BouncyCastle dependency of the SDK if you would do any “uber jars” (because it is a JCA provider and thus signed thus it will break signature if modified), or if you get a random error this is the first thing to look. But I sort of have a vague memory of there being some ways to have OSGi bundles have external 3rd party dependencies.

Note that things are not Serializable etc. basically all interactions with the SDK must happen within the same OSGi bundle (or like, you most likely can have multiple completely separate interactions, but you most likely are unable to transfer any SDK-specific classes between OSGi bundle boundaries directly, because as far as I’m understood each bundle has their own separate classloader, also note that there are somewhat a lot of classes needed to be loaded for the SDK to work).

Also, you want to call disconnect all UaClients, shut down all UaServers and then call StackUtils.shutdown() when you would unload the bundle to close resources, some of these are static in the StackUtils and would normally only shut down when the JVM shuts down (which might “never” happen in OSGi in the context of a module)

What the maven-install-helper maven project of the SDK distribution just does is to make the SDK available on the local machine (in the maven cache), by doing maven install on it. It is then on the machine similarly to anything you would have pulled from maven central i.e. the same as basically any other 3rd party dependency. That is to say, there is nothing OSGi-specific here.

Some old links from the past that may or may not be useful:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16933929/what-is-the-intended-use-case-for-bundle-classpath-in-osgi-bundles
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1340483/osgi-handling-3rd-party-jars-required-by-a-bundle
https://github.com/everit-org/osgi-bouncycastle-adapter
https://vzurczak.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/bouncycastle-osgi-and-uber-jars/

So basically you will want to search things like “OSGi 3rd party external dependency”, and treat the SDK (and the dependencies of the SDK) as such for OSGi purposes.

Let us know if this helped, or if there is something more modern tutorial on the matter (i.e. including general 3rd party dependencies in OSGi bundles).