Eclipse Helios (3.6) and why it's important to Notes administrators
Notes 8 is based on Eclipse and Eclipse use OSGi for bundle lifecycle and dependency management. Part of OSGi is the OSGi console that is a console into the inner working of OSGi. The console is very useful and may be used to diagnose Eclipse and Notes 8 issues. I've previously blogged about the OSGi console and how to access it in Notes in my "SWT@Notes 8: -console" post back in 2008. One of the cool things about the OSGi console is that you can write administrative commands for the console that you may invoke using the text based interface.
One major shortcoming of the OSGi console was that one could only access it once the platform was invoked that is it couldn't be accessed once Notes was started. This is a real bummer as it could be very useful in certain troubleshooting scenarios. This is about to change.
In the upcoming Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) release we'll get even easier access to the OSGi console as you may attach to OSGi console after launching the platform. Yeah!!
On his blog Chris Aniszczyk of Redhat has a post called "Easier access to the OSGi console":
In Eclipse 3.6 M7, it will be easier to access the OSGi Console within the running Eclipse. The Equinox team added a org.eclipse.osgi.framework.console.ConsoleSession service that you can use to get the input and output to a console session. The PDE team took advantage of this recently by extending the org.eclipse.ui.console.consoleFactories extension point and allowing you to bring up the OSGi console easily...