announce: gRPC/protoc codegen from within bndtools

[scott...@gmail.com]

I'm happy to announce the initial availability of a bndtools utility for generating java code from a gRPC/protocol buffers service declaration.   

The net effect is that from within a Eclipse/bndtools project, the presence of a protoc3 file will immediately generate all the java code to implement the service.   Subsequent editing/changing the protoc3 file from within Eclipse/bndtools will result in immediate regeneration of the java code as part of Eclipse's incremental build.   No need to manually invoke protoc/grpc from the command line.

The source for this utility along with installation instructions are here [1].    

This utility uses the relatively-new generate instruction in bnd/bndtools [2].

Thanks are due to Peter Kriens for contributing to the code to invoke protoc via the bnd generate command. 

This workspace template [3] provides project templates for a gRPC API, Impl, and Consumer example projects using this utility to generate a complete OSGi Remote Service.   This makes it possible to go from only a proto3 declaration to a working, testable OSGI Remote Service (with distribution by gRPC) in only a few minutes.

Scott

[1] https://bnd.bndtools.org/instructions/generate.html

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

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