Engineering | Christopher Frost | May 27, 2010 | ...

The release fixes a few bugs, release notes available from JIRA. This release can be downloaded from the project page on SpringSource.org.

The kernel startup hard timeout limit has been increased to allow dm Server to run on slower machines.
Documented a restriction in the OSGi web container, Tomcat <context> elements are not supported.
Fix to the ServiceScoper class to close all input streams.
Added support to tolerate File.list returning null occasionally, this manifested as the pickup directory wiping itself occasionally for seemingly no reason.
Usage of @Configurable with ServerOsgiBundleXmlWebApplicationContext now works.

The project is being donated to the Eclipse Foundation as Virgo. We aim to ship a baseline release of Virgo in due course which will be functionally equivalent to dm Server 2.0. See the Virgo website for further information. Along with dm Server SpringSource will offer commercial support for Virgo.

Spring Insight 1.0.0.M3 Released

Engineering | Jon Travis | May 26, 2010 | ...

The Spring Insight team is proud to announce the release of Spring Insight 1.0.0.M3. This release contains a ton of new enhancements to give you more productivity and get your application to production even faster. Spring Insight is available as part of tc Server Developer Edition and SpringSource Tool Suite but you can snag the new developer release at http://springsource.org/insight. Setup time will take you the usual 10 seconds.

Speed Tracer

The most-publicized new feature is our integration with Google Speed Tracer, which was announced at last week's Google IO conference. This innovative combination gives developers a full view into all the work performed in a web request -- from CSS styling and view rendering to JDBC queries and JSP render times. It was a real thrill to work with Google's engineers to come up with some cutting-edge use of this technology. You'll love this feature! It's a seamless integration that's trivial to work with and gives you a great deal of visibility you've never had before.

Simpler UI

We've also added a lot of information to the application: throughput and error rate metrics, health zones, deeper visibility into Spring controllers, deeper JDBC support, application health and more. This new information should not be overwhelming, however, because we have also invested a lot of time in simplicity, making our UI obvious and easy to navigate.

Development Kit

Finally, we published our Insight Development Kit (IDK). We've heard from many users that they want the ability to customize their application in Insight or want to add additional metrics. Insight now provides this capability with its @InsightOperation and @InsightEndPoint annotations as well as the IDK and tutorials for creating deeper plugins. The IDK includes the source for all the plugins that come with Insight (Apache 2.0 licensed) as well as the IDK APIs -- great examples and instructions for writing your own application.

The Spring Insight team is cranking on the next release, our train is cruising down the track, and we can't wait to hear your feedback and suggestions. Go grab the release off http://springsource.org/insight and leave us a comment in the community forums…

Spring Python 1.1 book is published

Engineering | Greg L. Turnquist | May 24, 2010 | ...

The Spring Python 1.1 book is published! Spring Python takes the concepts of the Spring Framework and Spring Security, and applies them to the world of Python.

In this book, you will be writing code using dependency injection, aspect oriented programming, data access, transaction management, remoting and security. Later on in the first case study, you will be building a banking web app and see how using all these components in concert quickly meets your needs. In the second case study you will integrate Python and Java together as you build a flight reservation system.

The book is full of code…

More Grails 1.3 features

Engineering | Peter Ledbrook | May 24, 2010 | ...

Last week, I described how Grails now treats plugins like normal dependencies that can be pulled from Maven-compatible repositories. Although this was the big new feature for 1.3, it wasn't the only one. In this post, I'll look at some of the others, starting with a feature that I only recently found out about.

Named queries

GORM provides three distinct ways of performing database queries:

dynamic finders, e.g. Book.findByTitleAndAuthorLike(...);
criteria queries, which use a nice DSL; and
HQL, Hibernate's SQL-like query language.

These three features provide a potent mix of ease-of-use and power, providing you with the flexibility you need. And yet there's something missing.

Develop a non-trivial Grails application and you will soon realise that you often use the same queries again and again. What should you do? The copy-and-paste technique is simple but leaves you with major maintenance issues. You could write service methods for each of your common…

Spring Roo 1.1.0.M1 Released

Engineering | Ben Alex | May 19, 2010 | ...

I'm delighted to announce that we've just released Spring Roo 1.1.0.M1. Spring Roo is the fastest way for Java developers to build Spring-based applications in the Java programming language. With the Roo 1.1.0.M1 you can build working web applications - complete with a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) front end - in as little as 200 keystrokes! Plus as usual we've concurrently released a new version of SpringSource Tool Suite (STS 2.3.3.M1) which is optimised for the latest and greatest Roo goodies!

There are over 200 fixes, enhancements and new features since our 1.0.2 release three months ago. Some…

Springing Ahead Toward The Open PaaS

Engineering | Rod Johnson | May 19, 2010 | ...

A few weeks ago I tweeted that—incredibly—SpringSource was executing faster within VMware than as a startup. Today we announce another exciting development bearing this out.

Following our VMforce partnership with SaaS leader salesforce.com, we are today announcing a collaboration between VMware and Google, centering around the Spring programming model and SpringSource IDE and RAD tooling. Today’s announcement makes Spring the preferred programming model for Google App Engine. This is a tremendous endorsement of Spring as the best and most portable programming model for Java and opens up a new deployment opportunity for Spring developers. The demo in today’s keynote at Google I/O showcased the results from months of collaboration between SpringSource and Google engineers—most of which benefits Spring developers, regardless of where they wish to…

Managing plugins with Grails 1.3

Engineering | Peter Ledbrook | May 18, 2010 | ...

For a long time, managing Grails dependencies simply meant putting them in your application's lib directory. Then came Grails 1.2 and the dependency DSL: you could finally declare your dependencies and have Grails automatically download them and make them available to your app. Great!

Now, Grails 1.3 has brought the dependency DSL to the realm of plugins.

So what?

Users have often faced two issues with the plugin system up till now:

setting up a suitable Subversion server to act as a Grails plugin repository is not simple; and
you can't control what dependencies a plugin brings into your application.

The first of these doesn't particularly apply to individual developers, but it's a bigger deal for companies where access to the internet may be restricted or where they want more control over the "latest" versions of libraries and plugins. How much better it would be if they could use a repository manager like Nexus or Artifactory.

As for the dependencies, some plugins include libraries you don't need or (even worse) break your application. With the dependency DSL, you can explicitly exclude problematic libraries.

Those are some of the reasons why this change might be…

Grails 1.3 Released

Engineering | Graeme Rocher | May 11, 2010 | ...

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Grails 1.3! Followers of Grails releases will recall that it has not been long since the last major release of Grails (Grails 1.2 was released in December), but given the need to get the latest and greatest version of Groovy in the hands of developers, Grails 1.3 can be seen as the Groovy 1.7 release. The Groovy team did a fantastic job in bringing all sorts of excellent new additions to the Groovy language such as annonymous inner/nested classes, an AST builder and power asserts (my personal favourite), all of which are now available in…

SpringSource To Acquire GemStone Data Management

Engineering | Rod Johnson | May 06, 2010 | ...

Another week, another important announcement. The SpringSource division of VMware today announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, a leader in data grid technology.

This acquisition, like our recent acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, adds another crucial building block of private and public cloud to our middleware portfolio. Like Rabbit and SpringSource and VMware’s other products, GemStone technology is valuable in both today’s enterprise scenarios and tomorrow’s cloud world. The acquisition also adds an important middleware capability to our…

VMforce Provides Spring Cloud Platform

Engineering | Rod Johnson | April 27, 2010 | ...

VMware and Salesforce today announced a partnership to build an enterprise Java cloud called VMforce. The announcement is understandably receiving a lot of attention in the wider industry context, but today I’d like to focus on the central role of SpringSource technology in the new platform and the unique and compelling benefits it brings developers in the Spring community.

What is VMforce?

VMforce is a joint service from VMware and SalesForce. VMforce uses the Force.com physical infrastructure to run vSphere with a special customized vCloud layer that allows for seamless scaling and management. Above this layer VMforce runs SpringSource tc Server instances that provide the execution environment for the enterprise applications that run on VMforce. Spring applications can store their own enterprise data in the Force.com database or use data already resident there. All of these architecture details are seamlessly integrated into a single platform that allows the developer to interact with the server in the way they would with a local tc Server or Tomcat instance.

Developing Spring Applications on VMforce

To ensure that developers are productive with this new platform and able to use their existing skillset, we are building integration with SpringSource Tool Suite that lets developers treat their VMforce account like a simple local Tomcat instance with incredible scalability. Like the rest of STS, the integration will be free.

The STS/VMforce integration means that you can drag and drop applications to deploy them to the platform and take advantage of incremental redeployment to do rapid round trip development even though the platform is…

Spring blog

SpringSource dm Server 2.0.2 is released today.