[caption id="attachment_1577" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Google App Engine Groovy"][/caption]

Google just announced that their Google App Engine cloud hosting platform now supports other languages than Python: namely Java and Groovy!

You can now effectively write your Google App Engine applications in Groovy!

A couple of weeks ago, the SpringSource Groovy team and the Google App Engine Java team worked together, hand in hand, to iron out the details, to ensure that the popular and award-winning Groovy dynamic language for the JVM would run well on this exciting platform. After having created together some patches for Groovy, in the area of constrained and strict security manager policies, the Groovy development team integrated these patches and released the updated Groovy 1.6.1 version in line for the D-Day…

Development work on dm Server 2.0 has been fully underway for some time now and I'm pleased to announce that the first milestone is available for download. Downloads are available from our home page. You can find more information about the features in this release and the coming release in my previous entry.

In this blog entry I'll outline:

• what is new in 2.0 M1
• building dm Server directly from SVN

We're using Scrum

For the development of the 2.0 release, the dm Server team have adopted Scrum. You can see our current sprint and release backlogs in our JIRA. As ever, the development of dm Server is driven by the requirements of our users. If you see an item on the…

We get a lot of questions from dm Server users about what to expect in the next few releases. In this blog entry, I will outline the main features that we have on our roadmap. We are following Scrum practices so you can expect to see reasonably frequent milestones as output from our sprints, and we are flexible in handling new requirements and changes in priorities.

Shared repositories

Shared repositories allow you to have a centralized location for managing the artifacts that are available to be installed in your dm Server instances. These shared repositories can then be added to a dm Server configuration at…

Over the past few months, the community has shown a great deal of interest in dm Server. The forums are very active and we always have stimulating discussions when presenting at conferences. We've noticed that a lot of the same questions come up as users start developing their first applications for dm Server, and so we've put together a Getting Started Guide to help get you up to speed much more quickly.

By reading the Getting Started Guide and studying the accompanying sample you'll learn best practices for :

• installing the dm Server
• setting up an effective development environment using the dm Server Eclipse tools
• creating web modules for presentation logic
• structuring your application with separate middle-tier and data access modules
• creating and managing shared services such as Data Sources
• creating unit and integration tests
• building dm Server applications using Maven

The guide is available in HTML and PDF formats, and the full code for the sample application can be found here…

Forrester recently described a trend that they refer to as "lean software" in their paper entitled Lean Software Is Agile, Fit-To-Purpose, And Efficient. They state that "lean software is emerging as the antidote to bloatware" and that "the trend toward lean software has been building for years, but the worldwide recession is accelerating it".

Forrester mentions SpringSource as one of four companies at the forefront of the lean software movement. This is due to our leadership within the Spring, Apache, Groovy and Grails communities, as well as our active encouragement, via SpringSource dm Server, of enterprise OSGi as the basis for next-generation application…

In an earlier post, I blogged about the REST capabilities we added to Spring @MVC version 3.0. Later, Alef wrote about using the introduced functionality to add an Atom view to the Pet Clinic application. In this post, I would like to introduce the client-side capabilities we added in Milestone 2.

RestTemplate

The RestTemplate is the central Spring class for client-side HTTP access. Conceptually, it is very similar to the JdbcTemplate, JmsTemplate, and the various other templates found in the Spring Framework and other portfolio projects. This means, for instance, that the RestTemplate is thread-safe once constructed, and that you can use callbacks to customize its operations.

RestTemplate Methods

The main entry points of the template are named after the six main HTTP methods:

HTTP	RestTemplate
DELETE	delete(String, String...)
GET	getForObject(String, Class, String...)
HEAD	headForHeaders(String, String...)
OPTIONS	optionsForAllow(String, String...)
POST	postForLocation(String, Object, String...)
PUT	put(String, Object, String...)

The names of these methods clearly indicate which HTTP method they invoke, while the second part of the name indicates what is returned. For instance, getForObject() will perform a GET, convert the HTTP response into an object type of your choice, and returns that object. postForLocation will do a POST, converting the given object into a HTTP request, and returns the response HTTP Location header where the newly created object can be…

In an earlier blog, Ben introduced Bundlor, the concepts behind it and how to use it from the command line as well as from within ANT and Maven. In this post I'll show how Bundlor can be used in an Eclipse environment.

When developing OSGi-based applications, some users don't want to spend time constantly updating their MANIFEST.MF, but instead want to focus on actual business logic in their application components: in such a scenario the Bundlor Eclipse integration will ensure that the MANIFEST.MF file reflects actual dependencies expressed by code artifacts in the project and removes the need to manually manage classpath settings in Eclipse. Additionally BundlorEclipse can help to cleanly separate runtime dependencies from test dependencies by introducing test-only…

It's the conference season. Despite the busy schedule, however, one conference stands alone for Spring content. SpringOne Europe is approaching fast. This year, it will be in Amsterdam, from April 27-29. Not only is Amsterdam a great destination in itself, the conference ends just before the Queen's Day holiday in the Netherlands: a fun cultural experience if you can spare an extra day.

SpringOne has always been a great conference, offering deep technical content and comprehensive coverage of Spring topics. We've been particularly busy over the last few months, so this year should be better…

As Rob's post points out, over the last few months we've learned quite a bit about how people want to manage their own OSGi applications.

We found that some developers want to manage their own bundle manifests, but need a bit of help to automate the details such as specifying package versions across a range of imports. Other developers want to have manifests generated based on the content of their project and the dependencies specified in their build files. In addition, both kinds of developers need to work with existing libraries that do not have the necessary OSGi metadata that enable them…