What is the appropriate embedding mechanism for jetty, felix, bundles and webapps

After looking for a long time without finding a good answer, I come to the place where good answers are found.

I'm creating en ecosystem of independent applications (modeled as a WebApp in a WAR) and service modules (plugins) that those WebApps can consume (modeled as an OSGI bundle). I'm having trouble getting my head around how to architect those elements with Apache Felix and Jetty. The way I understand it I have three possible ways of doing it, but I have no idea of the implication of each.

1. Create a felix container that brings up the plugins, and also brings jetty who eventually bring up the WebApps.

2. Create a jetty server with embedded felix to provide the plugins, and use Jetty's deployer to manage the WebApps.

3. Create a jetty server with a less complicated framework than OSGI to manage the plugins, and use Jetty's deployer to manage the WebApps.

Option 1 seems to be a very orthogonal solution, everything is an osgi module (assuming the wars are a module), and managing the whole thing would be just a matter of creating the felix infrastructure and bringing everything up. From my early testing, managing all these osgi modules in development is not an easy or fast task (but most likely I'm doing something wrong).

Option 2 seems that it would work (is the one that I have managed to get further from the two) and is simpler to manage my head around, since the OSGI is limited to managing only the plugin infrastructure and not the applications or the server.

Option 3 I haven't even started to explore.

I'm expecting to have several independent applications (WebApps) and many many plugins (OSGI modules) and I would like to hear from you on the pros and cons of each option, in terms of maintainability and ease of development.

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