First milestone of Virgo tooling

The first milestone of the Virgo IDE tooling is available. See the wiki for instructions. It should provide approximately the same level of function as the Virgo tooling that was provided as part of SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). It works nicely on Eclipse Indigo and Helios SR2, for example.

The basic functions allow you to develop OSGi bundles, including Web Application Bundles, and PARs and deploy them to an instance of Virgo Tomcat Server (or Virgo Web Server if you prefer to run v2.1 rather than a 3.0 milestone) running under the control of the tooling. It is also possible to develop plans, but this needs documenting better as it's not immediately obvious how to do it. See an earlier blog post if you need to run the Virgo kernel instead of Virgo Tomcat Server.

Please direct discussion to the Virgo forum and raise bugs on bugzilla (thanks Daniël van 't Ooster for the bugs you raised while I was writing this blog!). The source is available in Eclipse git for anyone who wants to make changes and/or send in patches. We are keen to encourage new contributors to Virgo in general and the Virgo tooling in particular.

What next? Well, the most urgent feature, bug 341910 which is a pre-req to the first release, is to remove the dependency on Spring IDE.

Then, over time, we expect to align the Virgo tooling with the Eclipse Libra project. Libra provides tooling for OSGi standards, so we aim to move the OSGi standard features of the Virgo tooling to Libra and end up with the Virgo tooling being a Virgo-specific extension of Libra.

Congratulations to Martin Lippert who started with the STS code and single-handedly achieved this milestone! You can see him in last week's OSGi Development Tooling Panel.