Virgo 2.1.0.M03-incubator is available from the Virgo website. The changes include:

• Further performance improvements, especially for Windows users.
• Update the version of Logback to 0.9.24 and SLF4J to 1.6.1
• Minor bug fixes

The performance improvement was achieved by adjusting the log level of entry exit tracing.

As a result of the new version of Logback the syntax of the configuration file 'serviceability.xml' has changed slightly. More information can be found here.

We have now published a plan outline for the future of Virgo so you have a better idea of where we are going.

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.

Here is a screencast showing the dm Admin Console for the dm Server. It gives a brief tour of the dm Admin Console and then shows some of the features by deploying a simple demo application. The application consists of a configuration file, a web bundle and a content bundle. When deployed the application simply shows the contents of the configuration file in a web browser. The application is installed in parts for the purpose of this demo, in reality you would group the application together with either a 'par' or a 'plan', to see how this is done with a 'plan' file another screencast is…

The dm Server has a new command line shell. It is currently available along with the existing Equinox shell and will replace it for the 2.0 release. Improvements over the Equinox shell include basic tab completion and a command history.

The dm Shell is available both locally and remotely over ssh. When used locally by starting the server with the './startup.sh -shell' option it will take over the console output once the dm Kernel has started. Console output will still be viewable in the event log. Either way the first thing to be produced is an ASCII art splash image followed by the command prompt ':> '…

New Features

A set of updates to the SpringSource dm Server Admin Console are available in the nightly builds. This also shows the use of Plans and the RFC66 Web container. There are two new features available, the first lets you look at any service dumps that the dm Server system may have produced and the second lets you explore the state of bundles within OSGi.

A dump may contain many dump items such as stack traces, thread dumps, depending on the initial cause. Dump items are available for viewing in the Admin Console, simply select the dump of interest on the left and then the dump item on the right…

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}…