Thursday, August 25, 2011

New Releases: Virgo 3.0 and Gemini Web 2.0

Virgo 3.0 and Gemini Web 2.0, collectively known as the Maya release, are available for download and download, respectively.

The team of committers has expanded considerably and, although the team is now distributed geographically, we have a great working relationship. I'm delighted that these projects are now community collaborations rather than the work of a single vendor.

The theme of Virgo 3.0 is better integration with EclipseRT technologies. To that end, we have created a Jetty variant of the Virgo web server and have switched from Felix to Equinox implementations of some OSGi services. Integration with p2 is proving a tough nut to crack and is deferred to the Bondi (3.5) release, although we expect to issue a milestone soon to get some feedback from the user community.

Gemini Web and the Tomcat variant of the Virgo web server have been upgraded to Tomcat 7 and Servlet 3.0.

Gemini Web 2.0 passes the OSGi Web Applications compliance tests and will replace the SpringSource OSGi Web Container as the OSGi Web Applications reference implementation.

The snaps framework for modular web applications is also released as part of Maya. This started life as the SpringSource slices prototype.

Virgo kernel 3.0 has a new shell based on Apache Felix Gogo for both the kernel and user region and accessible via telnet or ssh.

The 3.0 kernel also uses a new implementation of regions, the region digraph, based on OSGi standard framework hooks. The digraph should position Virgo well for implementing the OSGi Subsystems specification in a future release. (The specification is still under development, but we expect a public draft from the OSGi Alliance before long.) The digraph has moved from Virgo to Equinox to enable it to be used by other projects, especially those that are aiming to implement the Subsystems spec.

Highlights:

  • New Virgo Jetty Server
  • Virgo Tomcat Server and Gemini Web upgraded to Tomcat 7 and Servlet 3.0
  • New Snaps framework for modular web applications with new guide
  • New Gogo shell
  • New user guide for Gemini Web
  • Updated GreenPages sample with new guide
See the release notes for details.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

OSGi Running in the Cloud: Virgo in CloudFoundry

I'm just been tryout out Hristo Iliev's support for Virgo in CloudFoundry, described on his blog. The VM took a few hours to download and a few minutes to unzip, but then starting CloudFoundry and deploying an application to a Virgo instance worked first time.

CloudFoundry takes a little while to get started:






























But then it's trivial to deploy an application to a Virgo instance:



after which the application, in this case the Virgo web admin console, runs as expected at the application URL http://virgo.vcap.me:






















and jconsole shows where the Virgo instance has been created:















The cloud nature of this setup becomes more apparent when another application is deployed. Since I'm lazy, I deployed the same application under a different name:




















The application is then available at http://virgo2.vcap.me and jconsole shows there are now two Virgo instances running:





















I'm looking forward to Hristo's pull requests become merged into the CloudFoundry base and maybe eventually Virgo showing up in some clouds near you.

Projects

OSGi (130) Virgo (59) Eclipse (10) Equinox (9) dm Server (8) Felix (4) WebSphere (3) Aries (2) GlassFish (2) JBoss (1) Newton (1) WebLogic (1)