Eclipse Virgo 2.1.0 Release

Jump to Hyperspace, courtesy of Steve Jurvetson

Eclipse Virgo has shipped its first release after several months of work to contribute it to Eclipse.

The majority of the effort was to make the contribution acceptable from an Eclipse legal perspective. There were some close shaves, like when a file (mime.types) in the Spring Framework turned out to have a restrictive license. The file would have been virtually impossible to recreate from scratch. I am very grateful to the original author, Ian Graham, for solving this problem by making the content available under an Apache license. I would also like to thank Barb Cochrane and Sharon Corbett of the Eclipse legal team who cheerfully and efficiently handled over 200 "contribution questionnaires" covering the code donated to Virgo and its dependencies.

Apart from that, we have repackaged the code in the org.eclipse namespace, speeded up the startup considerably, upgraded several dependencies, fixed a few bugs, and made several enhancements.

The response from the community was particularly encouraging with thousands of downloads of the milestones and numerous forum posts and mailing list discussions. We are particularly grateful to the code contributors, listed in the release notes.

The main objective of contributing Virgo was to grow the community and thereby make the technology more easily consumed by application developers. The project seems to be meeting the community objective and we are now preparing to donate the Virgo tooling to Eclipse which will enable the community to help us make the developer experience smoother, especially for newcomers to modularity and OSGi.

Finally, I'd like to thank the other Virgo committers, Chris Frost and Steve Powell, for their persistence and thoroughness. I'm glad we can now move on to more interesting items for the next release. Thanks too to everyone else in SpringSource who supported the Virgo project in various ways. We couldn't have done it without you.

The future looks promising, starting with a Virgo face to face meeting at the end of this month. It's not too late to express your interest (on virgo-dev) if you would like to attend.