Has anyone considered using OSGI declarative services or the blueprints service such as Apache Aries (or of course the ponderous Spring DM) instead having developers writing straight to the OSGi API? This would let developers write their initialization methods as plain java methods, and tools like Bundlor and bnd can scan the xml files and automatically write the manifest, which is usually pretty error-prone to do it by hand.
I think DS or blueprints would really come to shine when modules start using services from each other, because it would link them by service names and not necessarily the implementation's package, making alternative implementations of modules easier to write.
I see there hasnt been a lot of activity on the forum, so I'm hoping things are busy behind the scenes ... as one doing OSGi dev work myself, I'm happy to see a GUI OSGi app in the wild that isn't Eclipse
(Incidentally it would handily tackle
this issue too)