Yesterday JetBrains released the first milestone of the next version of IntelliJ IDEA - codenamed Maia. One of the new features of Maia is “OSGi Support”. The OSGi support in Maia is provided by a bundled version of Osmorc.

The bundling of Osmorc has several effects on Osmorc.

One of the effects is that the name “Osmorc” vanishes from the visible parts of the plugin. There’s still a place or two where it appears, but that’s only because I was lazy in replacing all occurrences with something meaningful for people who are looking for OSGi in IDEA. Now that Osmorc is bundled with IDEA that change is a logical one. People using Maia, will look for “OSGi” in the UI to find out how to get their OSGi projects working in IDEA. No one really cares which plugin provides a functionality as long as it’s there and working.

Osmorc also changed the subversion repository. While the branch for IDEA 8 is still active on Sourceforge, the new trunk for Maia is hosted by JetBrains. Osmorc is part of every new IDEA build and Osmorc’s JUnit tests are now part of IDEA’s big test suite that is executed frequently on the build servers.

As developers of a bundled plugin we can directly contact people at JetBrains with questions and as the issue tracker shows, there are quality assurance people at JetBrains testing Osmorc and posting issues for bugs and enhancements. We also have access to some resources not available publicly. We don’t need to wait for the next official EAP build of IDEA for example.

The bundling of Osmorc in IDEA is a great step for Osmorc and I’m looking forward to the future development of the plugin.