tooling for grpc/protobuf in bndtools?

[Scott Lewis]

I've recently implemented a Remote Services distribution provider based upon gRPC/protobuf [1]. It's based upon gRPC-java, which is based upon google's protocol buffers. 

As the example remote service in [1] shows, the use of grpc/protobuf requires a good deal of tooling support...mostly around

a) creating/editing the proto3 file

b) generating the code from the proto3-declared messages and services w/o using maven plugins (as the examples in [1] do now)

c) creating the code+ds+metadata for remote service API, impl, consumer bundles

I would like to simplify both a and b...for the creation of OSGi remote services.

For a:  I've been talking with the author of this Eclipse-based proto3 editor plugin [2].  As he has stopped working on it, he's agreed to contribute this code as a starting point for additional efforts.   

For b:  I would like to use the newly added bndtools -generate to invoke the protoc compiler (with grpc, and grpc-osgi-generator plugins) at code generation time in the IDE...without maven plugins.  I hope this could be used to generate and then compile the protobuf+grpc-java classes to implement the service API as per the example in [1].

For c:  I intend to create project and bndrun templates and add them to the ECF Remote Service bndtools workspace [2]

Are others that are interested in contributing to a and b in particular?

Scott

[1] https://github.com/ECF/grpc-RemoteServicesProvider

[2] https://github.com/ECF/bndtools.workspace