(updated 15Oct2009) Beginning in milestone M5, dm Server 2.0 employs regions to isolate the kernel from users’ applications. This means that the kernel implementation is almost completely invisible to applications and to application management.

Also in milestone M5, support for cloning is completely removed. Region isolation and scoped plans between them offer much simpler and more manageable solutions to the most common problems that cloning was intended to address.

In the following two sections I outline these changes, and the reasons we made them.

The regional news

dm Kernel creates a single User Region in which to run applications and all applications (including the ones that dm Server supplies—Splash, Admin, Web and Hosted Repository) are deployed into the User Region…

dm Server 2.0.0.M5 is now available and can be downloaded from here.

We’re getting towards the end of the 2.0.0 release cycle so most of the work in this milestone is focused on locking down the user interaction model. Take a look at the M5 release notes for the full details of what we’ve been working on. Please keep your feedback coming as comments on our blog, in the forums and on JIRA.

Please also watch the blog for detailed posts on many of the new features referenced in this New and Noteworthy.

New and Noteworthy

Deploying Configuration Files

Properties files can now be deployed in either the pickup directory or in any configured repository. The content of these files is then accessible in OSGi’s ConfigurationAdmin at a PID specified as the file’s name without the .properties extension.

Plan Attributes and Properties

Plans can now have globally defined attributes used for substitution.

<attributes>
	<attribute name="version" value="[1.0.0, 2.0.0)"/>
</attributes>

<artifact type="bundle" name="org.springframework.context.support" version="${version}"/>

Artifacts within plans can have properties defined which are translated into Bundle manifest headers at deployment time.

<artifact type="bundle" name="my.webapp" version="[1.0.0, 2.0.0)">
	<property name="Web-ContextPath" value="/foo"/>
</artifact>

Admin Console

The Artifacts page of the admin console has been spruced up to render the dependencies of user installed artifacts as trees. In addition, each level of these trees is lazily loaded improving load-time performance.

Command-line Shell

dm Server now ships with a command line shell to replace the Equinox console that was previously used. This console is accessible locally with the -shell startup command.

$ bin/startup.sh -shell
<KE0001I> Kernel starting.
<KE0002I> Kernel started.
<SH0001I> dm Kernel ssh shell available on port 2402.

     @@@ ***
    @@@ *****            .__.                  .__.            .__.  .__.
   @@@@ ******         __|  |  _____     _____.|  |__    ___…

Last month, almost 4 years after the initial 4.0 release, OSGi Alliance officially approved the OSGi service platform 4.2 release. The announcement headline featured the Blueprint Container Service, a new addition to the Compendium specification based on the programming model promoted by the Spring Dynamic Modules (also known as Spring OSGi) project. To quickly summarize Blueprint, I will just blatantly quote the OSGi spec:

(Blueprint Container) [...] defines a dependency injection framework, specifically for OSGi bundles, that understands the unique dynamic nature of services. It provides an OSGi bundle programming model with minimal implementation dependencies and virtually no accidental complexity in the Java code.

Users familiar with IoC concepts or Spring and Spring DM configuration, will find the Blueprint specification easy to grasp. In fact, being derived from Spring DM, many of…

When you launch a Java web application on Cloud Foundry, you can specify many aspects of a deployment blueprint including: •    Single instance vs. Multiple instances topology •    Virtual instance types •    Public facing IP address •    SSL configuration •    JVM options •    Database configuration •    Monitoring and management •    Self-healing and auto-scaling options •    And more…

The wide range of options gives you the ability to configure the optimal deployment blueprint for your application. The bad news was that you had to re-enter those carefully chosen settings each time you…

I'm pleased to announce that we recently released the first Spring 3.0 release candidate (download page). This release completes the key Spring 3.0 feature set. You certainly remember the original Spring 3.0 themes REST and EL; in the meantime, we have been expanding the list significantly:

• Fully Java 5 based: This is the first Spring generation which requires Java 5 or above, with Java 5 syntax used in the entire Spring API as well as in the entire implementation codebase. For example, the BeanFactory API returns generically typed bean instances wherever possible, and ApplicationListeners may declare a specific event type using generics now. For a comparison: In Spring 2.5, the actual Spring core was still JDK 1.4 compatible, while a lot of higher-level functionality was built on Java 5.

• Spring expression language (SpEL): a core expression parser for use in bean definitions, allowing for references to nested bean structures (e.g. properties of other beans) as well as to environmental data structures (e.g. system property values) through a common #{...} syntax in property values. This also serves as a foundation for various expression-based features across the Spring project portfolio.

  …

We're pleased to announce that the first milestone of the Spring Security Kerberos Extension is now available for download. The release is also available through the Maven milestone repository at http://maven.springframework.org/milestone. With the Spring Security Kerberos Extension, your users are authenticated against your web application just by opening the URL. There is no need to enter a username/password and no need to install additional software.

Before going deeper into Kerberos, I would like to introduce Spring Security Extensions, a new Spring Extension project dedicated to provide…

I'm pleased to announce that beginning with its newly released 1.0.0.M6 version, Bundlor now supports OSGi Blueprint Service files.

As with the support for Spring-DM contexts, Bundlor scans for Blueprint Service configuration files in both the default location (OSGI-INF/blueprint/*.xml) and in locations specified with the custom Bundle-Blueprint manifest header. When these files are found, they are scanned for class and interface names and the packages for those types are added to the OSGi manifest that Bundlor creates.

For information about Bundlor and to download this latest milestone, please visit the Bundlor project page…

This news just in from Arjen Poutsma's twitter feed: Spring 3.0.0.RC1 is now available.

Download | Javadoc API | Change Log

Thank you to all of the dedicated community members that have given feedback and identified issues. Please keep up the good work as we push toward GA.

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the 1.0.1 maintenance release of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the open source solution for building Spring-powered RIAs with Adobe Flex, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

Along with a number of minor bug fixes and enhancements, we have done some restructuring of the popular Spring BlazeDS Test Drive bundled sample application to make it even easier to get up and running in a variety of different environments, and to bring some of the configuration elements further in line with what you might see in the near future in a SpringSource Tool Suite project creation template for Spring BlazeDS Integration projects. Also, we've enhanced the security example further to really show how having Spring Security so tightly integrated sets this solution apart from alternate approaches to securing Flex applications.

As always, I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the release and giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira. We've been getting some great feedback from people having success with Spring BlazeDS Integration in their projects, and we look forward to hearing more about your experiences.

Lastly, for anyone headed to Adobe MAX 2009, be sure and check out the session I'll be co-presenting with Mark Fisher on "Integrating Spring with BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services" on Wednesday, October 7th at 2PM.