The first release candidate of the Gemini Web project is available for download. See the bug list for what's changed since milestone 4. Thanks to Violeta Georgieva of SAP for her continued contributions.

The project is due for an Eclipse review on 20 October so that it can graduate from incubation and ship a 1.1.0 release by the end of October. The Virgo project, which depends on Gemini Web, should also graduate and ship its 2.1.0 release concurrently with Gemini Web.

SpringSource dm Server 2.0.3 is available for download. This purpose of this release is to fix a severe problem on Windows when the root logging level is configured to "debug". This bug was reported and fixed in Virgo and then backported for existing customers since Virgo has not yet shipped its baseline release (planned for 4Q10).

Gemini Web milestone 4 (1.1.0.M04-incubation) is available for download.

Notable changes:

• Upgrade to Tomcat 6.0.29 (plus SpringSource mods) to close some security vulnerabilities
• Restructure Tomcat bundles to enable clustering to work - see bug 322983
• Various test and build improvements

Virgo milestone 2.1.0.M04-incubation is available for download.

Changes:

• Bug 323609 fixed: severe logging performance issue under Windows in certain scenarios
• OSGi extensions change in preparation for Equinox 3.6 upgrade contributed by Hristo Illiev
• New testcases and test coverage improvements contributed by Olivier Girardot
• Support new framework property org.eclipse.virgo.suppress.heap.dumps and document it in User Guide
• Unused EquinoxConsoleManager deleted
• Various build and test improvements

See the bug list for more details.

Virgo 2.1.0.M02-incubator is available for download. Apart from completing the "getting started guide", this milestone dramatically reduces startup time - by as much as 5x on some systems.

This should be a further incentive for users of dm Server to migrate to Virgo: Virgo is the codebase for future development, has more liberal licensing, and now provides much faster startup.

Measurements

We measured elapsed time for a warm startup (i.e. without -clean) of the Virgo web server and compared milestone M02 to M01.

On a quad-core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz machine, startup reduced from 68 to 12 seconds, an…

The first milestone (1.1.0.M01) of Eclipse Gemini Web is now available for download, dual-licensed under the Eclipse Public License and the Apache License 2.0.

SpringSource developed the Reference Implementation of the OSGi Web Container and then contributed the code to Eclipse as the Web sub-project of Gemini. The goal of Gemini is to provide modular implementations of Java EE technology. Gemini Web provides servlet and JSP technology.

Gemini Web runs on the Equinox OSGi framework and embeds Tomcat. It is also integrated into the Eclipse Virgo web server.

For more information see the documentation and the wiki…

The first milestone (2.1.0.M01) of Eclipse Virgo is now available for download under the Eclipse Public License. This consists of an application server, known as the Virgo Web Server, and a stand-alone kernel.

The goal of this milestone is for dm Server 2.0.x users to be able to migrate to it relatively painlessly and have an equally stable environment. SpringSource is offering commercial support for Virgo and we encourage all dm Server users to migrate to Virgo. The main communication channel with users is now the Virgo forum. There is also a Virgo developer mailing list and a weekly Virgo community call…

SpringSource dm Server 2.0.1 is released today.

The release fixes a few minor bugs and one security issue. The Admin Console's version of dojo is upgraded from 1.3.2 to 1.3.3 to prevent an open redirect attack.

The release also includes the final Reference Implementation of the OSGi Web Container. The OSGi Web Container specification was recently released by the OSGi Alliance as part of the OSGi 4.2 Enterprise Specification.

No further releases of dm Server are planned as the project is being donated to the Eclipse Foundation as Virgo. We aim to ship a baseline release of Virgo in due course…

Cloning is the feature in dm Server 2.0 which copies certain bundles and libraries into a scoped application (that is, a PAR or a scoped plan) as described in the roadmap.

The support for cloning in dm Server has progressed steadily over the last few sprints. The fundamental mechanisms were in place in M1: cloning may be triggered:

• manually by specifying the directive sharing:=clone on import-library or import-bundle
• automatically when a scoped application fails to resolve because of a uses constraint violation.

Since then the code was tidied up somewhat, a major performance optimisation was added for the common case of Spring framework being cloned, log messages were added to indicate which bundles have been cloned, tracing was improved, and a few bugs were fixed.

We have noticed that manual cloning is a relatively safe operation as it is completely under the user's control. However, automatic cloning is always speculative. It is driven by OSGi resolver failures, in particular violations of uses constraints (as explained in an earlier blog). Some uses constraint violations cannot be avoided by cloning, but we can't tell until automatic cloning has been attempted and the uses…

The OSGi Alliance has decided to accommodate vendor-specific manifest headers by listing them in a public registry. The aim is to avoid clashes between vendors and between vendors and OSGi's own headers.

The registry currently contains OSGi's own headers, those introduced by SpringSource dm Server, and two used by the bnd tool.