Today, we make another significant announcement. SpringSource is launching an enterprise Java cloud—SpringSource Cloud Foundry.

This initiative is a logical extension of our integrated Build/Run/Manage approach to unifying the application lifecycle, extending our vision of simplifying enterprise Java beyond the traditional data center. As cloud computing becomes more important, we want to ensure that Java developers can take full advantage of it. We believe that our leadership in Java development, coupled with our strength in the runtime and management phases, enables us to provide a…

This release got overshadowed by some of the recent news this week, but I want to tell the community that Spring 3.0.0.M4 is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | Change Log

This release includes some documentation changes, updated OSGi manifest information, a number of other improvements, along with some small revisions to supported frameworks like Hibernate, Tiles and others. Thank you to all of the dedicated community members that have given feedback and identified issues.

If you want to understand at a strategic level what the implications of VMware’s recently announced acquisition of SpringSource are, there are several good sources, including Steve Herrod’s (CTO of VMware) blog post, Rod Johnson’s commentary, Paul Maritz’s press and analyst call, and Darryl Taft’s insightful piece in eWeek.

In this post I will focus more on what this all means at a technical level, to give you an idea of the kinds of capabilities you can look forward to.

Firstly, let me reiterate that nothing changes with respect to our open source projects and  SpringSource product offerings. Nothing changes that is, apart from the fact that we’ll have even more opportunity in the future to add exciting new features to them. Spring 3.0 is coming soon, and we just released milestone 4. dm Server is making rapid progress towards a 2.0 release, and we have some very cool stuff up our sleeves for a forthcoming release of tc Server. The Eclipse tool support for Groovy is generating masses of interest, Grails is pushing on towards a 1.2 release…

Today I want to share some exciting news. We have signed a definitive agreement with VMware, who will acquire SpringSource. Subject to regulatory approval, we expect the transaction to close in Q3. SpringSource will become a division within VMware. I will continue to lead SpringSource, reporting to VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

Today I would like to explain the vision and careful reasoning behind this deal: why it’s natural and logical; why it can lead to the creation of amazing technology that will immensely benefit users; why it’s good for Spring and other technologies SpringSource leads or contributes to; why it’s good for the Spring community…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that the Spring Web Flow 2.0.8 release is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | Change Log

This release includes a number of small bug fixes and minor improvements, along with a few updates to the documentation. We would like to extend a sincere thanks to our active and dedicated community, as several of the issues were resolved with the help of community-contributed patches.

Jeremy Grelle
Spring Web Products Team

I'm pleased to announce a new screencast for SpringSource Slices. This screencast walks through the creation of the menu-bar sample application. It shows how a host can use a collection of slices to populate a menu bar dynamically without restarting and can be completely de-coupled from the knowledge of exactly what items might be in the menu-bar. In addition, the slices only provide their specific content, and include formatting and other window content from the host bundle.

Slice Menu Bar (5:19)

• QuickTime (24.1 MB)

Source Code

• Package - Download
• Git - git://git.springsource.org/slices/slices.git

dm Server 2.0.0.M4 has been released, and is now available for download.

We've made a lot of progress since 2.0.0.M3, adding a number of new features upon which the users tracking the nightly builds have already given us some excellent feedback. Take a look at the M4 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

dm Server now embeds Medic: our OSGi serviceability project

As part of the work on M4, we've moved dm Server's serviceability support out into a separate ASL-licensed project called Medic. As part of this move, we've also taken the opportunity to make some significant improvements:

• The logging support is now based on LogBack which means that users now have complete control over the format of log output and have the complete range of LogBack's appenders available to them.
• Support for serviceability dumps is now fully extensible. User code running in dm Server can now contribute to serviceability dumps simply by publishing a DumpContributor implementation to the service registry.
• Event log support (the coded messages that are output to the console) is also available to user code. Event log entries can be generated using an EventLogger which can be obtained from the service registry.

We'll be blogging more about Medic, covering how to use it both in dm Server and in plain OSGi, in the coming weeks.

Support for deploying properties files

Properties files can now be deployed to dm Server, either through the admin console, or by dropping them into the pickup directory. When a properties file is deployed, a ConfigurationAdmin Configuration is created with a pid derived from the name of the properties file. For example deploying a properties file named com.foo.bar.properties will create a Configuration with the pid com.foo.bar.

Admin console enhancements

We've some significant improvements to the admin console in M4. Chris already covered some of these in his recent blog.

In addition to the enhancements that…

I'm happy to announce that we just released the final version of SpringSource Tool Suite 2.1.0; the first GA version with major enhancements since making STS freely available.

The release comes with brand-new installers for all supported platforms and bundles latest versions of SpringSource tc and dm Server as well as Spring Roo. Additionally you can choose between distributions based on Eclipse 3.4 and the recently released 3.5 aka Eclipse Galileo.

Because we've seen lots of interest in the new Groovy tools we also offer a bundled download of STS and the Groovy Eclipse Plugin.

Features

The list of new features in STS is long and we already covered some of them in previous blog posts. Review the New & Noteworthy…

SpringSource Tool Suite 2.1.0 is now GA and ready for download. Christian Dupuis' blog post covers all the new features included in the best development tool for building Spring powered applications:

• Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) support and platform specific installers for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux
• Support for milestones of Spring 3.0 including XML editing and validation, support for @Configuration and @Bean annotations
• Support for milestones of SpringSource dm Server 2.0, RFC66 web modules and SpringSource Bundlor integration
• Integration of Spring Roo for rapid application development
• Optional integration of the new alpha Groovy Eclipse Plugin