Following my previous entry many people have been asking about the impact that the move to the OSGi Web Container will have on dm Server. The most common questions being asked are:

• What is being added?
• What is staying the same?
• What is changing?
• How do I keep up to date?

I'll address each of these questions independently. If you have any more questions, please feel free to comment.

What is being added?

Integrating with the Web Container RI will give dm Server access to all the features of the OSGi Web Container standard. This includes a standard model for how WARs are handled, support for the webbundle URL scheme and support for the Web Container extender.

I'm exploring some nice value-added features for the RI including dynamic configuration using ConfigAdmin, a comprehensive MBean interface to introspect deployed web bundles and EventAdmin integration to monitor lifecycle events. All of these features will be added to dm Server as well as to the RI.

What is staying the same?

You'll be pleased to know that much of what you have learnt about web applications in dm Server remains the same.

Using the dm Server deployer

In addition to support for webbundle URLs, WAR files can still be deployed using the dm Server deployer. All paths into the deployer are supported including the pickup directory, deployer MBean and Admin Console.

When deploying using the dm Server deployer, WAR file dependencies will be automatically installed from the bundles available in the configured repository chain.

WAR deployment patterns

All the WAR types mentioned in the Programmer's Guide remain - in fact they are part of the Web Container standard.

System package imports

WARs deployed using dm Server will auto-import all the configured system packages even if this feature doesn't make it into the standard. If deploying using a webbundle URL you can trigger system package import using a URL parameter. I'm hopeful that the spec will include some standard behaviour in this area

What is changing?

We are aiming to keep the most features the same in dm Server, but the move to the Web Container does necessitate some changes. At the same time, we're taking advantage of the code rework to integrate some of the more popular feature requests we see from our users.

Web modules are being removed

The biggest change is the removal of web modules. Our preference is to support standards-based approaches, and now that we've been able to work with the OSGi Alliance to create a standards-based approach to web applications on OSGi, we are moving to it in preference to a dm Server-specific solution.

For those of you who are using web modules today, I'm really interested to hear what features you like the most and would be sad to lose. There is no reason why important web modules features cannot be reworked on top of Web Container web bundles.

Switch to Tomcat config format

In the 1.0.x line, the Tomcat instance embedded in dm Server is configured using the JSON configuration file format. Many of our users have requested that we switch back to using Tomcat's XML format. The Web Container RI uses the standard Tomcat format and when dm Server switches to the Web Container it will switch configuration file formats as well.

I'm still finalizing the exact details of where the configuration files will be stored. I'm hoping to be able to parameterize the Tomcat configuration file with placeholders that can be populated from ConfigAdmin

How do I keep up to date?

The easiest way to stay abreast of the progress is to track the SVN repos for the Web Container and for dm Server Web. You can access these repos at the URLs below:

• OSGi Web Container - https://anonsvn.springsource.org/svn/dm-server-osgi-web-container/trunk
• dm Server Web - https://anonsvn.springsource.org/svn/dm-server-web/main-branches/jersey

I'll be blogging here regularly and you can follow progress on Twitter with #osgi and #dmserver.

Progress Update

Today I am pleased to announce that we have just released Spring Roo 1.0.0.M1. This release not only features numerous fixes, enhancements and a 31% performance improvement, but also an exciting range of new capabilities including email services, JMS, Spring Web Flow, simplified installation and automatic Selenium support. That's on top of those many capabilities already present in the alpha releases, as mentioned in my earlier blog entry.

In addition to working on the first milestone release, over the last month we've also established the public project infrastructure typical of open source projects. We now have available a community support forum, Jira issue tracking, public Subversion repository, FishEye source monitoring and so on. Some of the comments reported on the #roo Twitter…

Updated: added version control instructions for Git.

For the last few months I've been working with Subbarao Meduri, Graham Charters, Hal Hildebrand and others from the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group on the RFC66 Web Container specification. The Web Container specification defines how WAR files can be deployed on an OSGi service platform in a standard way.

This is extremely interesting for us, because dm Server has supported WAR files for nearly 18 months now and we are excited to be able to work towards a standard model. As an end user, you'll be able to deploy WAR files on OSGi without…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the second release candidate of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the open source solution for building Spring-powered RIAs with Adobe Flex, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

This is mainly a bug fix release to correct some minor issues found thanks to the fantastic community feedback in response to RC1, but we've also made some key improvements to the way the project is packaged and made available. We are now bundling the comprehensive Spring BlazeDS Integration Test Drive sample application, developed in conjunction with Adobe, together with the project distribution. This version of the Test Drive is set up to be built with Maven, imported into Eclipse, and run with WTP. A short guide to building and running the sample has been added to the reference manual. Additionally, this is the first release to publish Maven-central-compatible POM's, available in our milestone repository.

The community has provided us with excellent feedback throughout the development process, and I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the new functionality and giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira as we push quickly towards a final 1.0.

dm Server 2.0.0.M2 has been released, and is now available for download. In the two sprints since 2.0.0.M1, we've made significant progress towards the final release, both in terms of new features, and in defect fixes. Take a look at the M2 release notes if you're interested in seeing everything that we've been working on. Please keep your feedback coming as comments on our blog, in the forums, and on JIRA.

New and noteworthy

Spring 3 support

Improvements to cloning

Watched repositories

Here's some example configuration for a watched repository:

"watched-repo" : {
    "type" : "watched",
    "watchDirectory" : "repository/watched",
    "watchInterval" : 5
}

When managing and transforming as many bundles as are included in the the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository, it becomes very difficult to remember what packages are boot delegated, exported from the system bundle, or from other bundles in your system. This information is important because you probably don't want to import packages that are boot delegated, you probably do want to import system bundle packages at "0", and you want to define custom imports for all others. Remembering which packages are in each of these categories ends up being a bit error prone and defining template…

Today we are pleased to announce the availability of Grails 1.1.1 which whilst providing many incremental improvements over Grails 1.1 also introduces official support for Google AppEngine.

Groovy itself has been running on AppEngine since its launch, but we had to make a few tweaks here and there in Grails to make Grails applications run on AppEngine.

Included in this is the introduction of an AppEngine plugin which replaces Hibernate with JDO (and soon JPA) for persistence in order to take advantage of Google's DataStore API. The AppEngine plugin also integrates the AppEngine development…

Introduction

Recently the M3 milestone of Bundlor has been released (Forum Anouncement). This milestone adds support for Property Substitution and Version Expansion. This blog post explains how to work with these new features to improve the quality of generated Manifests.

Property Substitution

Bundlor can now be used to substitute any property value into your Manifest Template.

Bundle-Name: ${name}
Bundle-Description: Test bundle using new version of Kernel at ${com.springsource.kernel}
Import-Template: com.springsource.kernel.*;version="${com.springsource.kernel}"

This syntax allows you to specify property placeholders for ${name} and ${com.springsource.kernel} and have them substituted at runtime with actual values. The way that these values are passed in is specific to which Bundlor front end is being used.

Specifying Properties at the Command Line

When Bundlor is run from the command line it will use all the properties available as system properties, this does not include any environment variables. The command line script will pass through any variables passed in via -D so the following will provide the ${com.springsource.kernel} property with a value of '2.0.0.RELEASE' and the ${name}…

It was April 27th around 2:39pm, when Rod announced in his SpringOne Europe opening keynote:

Reto Meier, with our partner namics, took a picture as proof of that very moment and published it on flickr.com. Also the audience at SpringOne seemed to be enthusiastic about the announcement and as a consequence the word was spread to outside of the conference soon after.

So here we are, since Rod promised it, we can't get out of it… ;-)

Today we are proud to deliver on Rod's promise and can announce that the first free versions of STS have been published and can be downloaded from the product page…