Testing bundles with PAX Exam

For integration testing OSGi bundles there is pretty much only one option - it's PAX Exam.  This week, as part of preparing a talk for ApacheCon I decided I wanted to have a simple 'HelloWorld' test showing the use of PAX Exam. It was all pretty straightforward - except for one thing that took hours to resolve - I thought the one thing might be worth mentioning.

I use Maven to build with, the application I was trying to write a test for was a stand alone version of this OSGi Blueprint Hello World sample. The application is pretty trivial and so is the test case. I used Craig Walls' tutorial to get me started.


So, what was the problem? This was what happened when I ran 'mvn install' in my test project in an attempt to run my test case:

I had no idea why anything was looking for com/sun/jdmk/jmxtools/1.2.1/jmxtools-1.2.1.jar, it certainly wasn't something I'd specified as a dependency in the project pom. Eventually, after much searching around, I looked at the Apache Aries default-parent pom and noted that some 'exclusions' had been added to the pax-logging section. I copied the same exclusions into my test project's pom and everything just worked.  The relevant sections of the pom are highlighted below:

Hope this helps - apart from that small problem I really like PAX Exam :-)