This plugin for Maven 2 is based on the BND tool from Peter Kriens. The way BND works is by treating your project as a big collection of classes (e.g., project code, dependencies, and the class path). The way you create a bundle with BND is to tell it the content of the bundle's JAR file as a subset of the available classes. This plugin wraps BND to make it work specifically with the Maven 2 project structure and to provide it with reasonable default behavior for Maven 2 projects.
Since the 1.4.0 release, this plugin also aims to automate OBR (OSGi Bundle Repository) management. It helps manage a local OBR for your local Maven repository, and also supports remote OBRs for bundle distribution. The plug-in automatically computes bundle capabilities and requirements, using a combination of Bindex and Maven metadata.
Felix is a community effort to implement the OSGi R4 Service Platform, which includes the OSGi framework and standard services, as well as providing and supporting other interesting OSGi-related technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide a completely compliant implementation of the OSGi framework and standard services and to support a community around this technology. Felix currently implements a large portion of the OSGi release 4 specification, but additional work is necessary for full compliance. Despite this fact, the OSGi framework functionality provided by Felix is very stable.