Virgo 3.6.0 released

Virgo 3.6.0 is available for download. Although the release includes many small enhancements and bug fixes, some major new features are worth highlighting and there is one smaller one I'd like to draw to the attention of Windows users.

Mike Milinkovich, the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, spoke of Virgo 3.6.0 in his recent JAX interview:

"A third important milestone was SAP shipping its Netweaver Cloud offering based on the Eclipse Virgo project. Having a major vendor basing such a significant product on Eclipse runtime technologies is a great endorsement of the work that the Eclipse RT community has been doing for several years."

So, let's look at the new features.

Java Enterprise APIs

The Virgo Nano Web distribution now integrates several open source Java Enterprise API implementations which will reduce the barrier to entry for a large class of existing applications.

The SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform, which uses Virgo Nano Web as its application server, has been certified against the Java EE Web Profile. Although Virgo has not been certified, I'm optimistic that if Virgo eventually gains access to the Web Profile TCK (discussed by the Eclipse Board in June), it shouldn't be too onerous to get it to pass. Until such time as we certify Virgo, we have to be careful not to claim support for the relevant APIs. Please see the release notes for further details of the APIs and implementations involved.

Virgo continues its first class support for Spring by embedding Spring framework 3.1 and supporting Spring framework 3.2 in the kernel-based deliverables.

Virgo users now have the choice of using Spring or Java Enterprise APIs to develop Virgo applications. Alternatively, they are free to take the minimal Nano or kernel deliverables and build their own custom runtimes, like Infor did with their ION server.

See the Virgo feature summary for a comparison of the various Virgo deliverables.

New Web Admin Console

This began life as a skunk-works project by my colleague Chris Frost. The new web admin console is an AJAJ application backed by the Jolokia OSGi agent paired with Gemini Management. Gemini Management and the Virgo kernel publish JMX mbeans which enable Virgo to be managed and inspected. Jolokia provides JSON access to those mbeans which are then available to the JavaScript running in the admin console. Again, more of this in the release notes and an upcoming blog from Chris - meanwhile here's an earlier blog.

We are particularly fond of the OSGi explorer which provides a graphical depiction of package and service wirings. The initial prototype was implemented by David Normington during a short internship here at SpringSource. Below is an example package wiring diagram.

We had lots of fun testing and fixing the admin console (especially on IE), but we are rather pleased with the result. It seems to push the SVG implementations fairly hard though. Take this example of large "fan-out":

If we scroll to the far left on Safari, the Bezier curves are nice and smooth:

Compare the result in Chrome:

Again see the release notes for more details and screenshots.

The master stroke of the new web admin console is that by minimising its dependencies (shown below), it is now available in all Virgo runtimes, right down to Nano, and smoothly degrades on Nano and Nano Web by omitting panels which are only relevant to kernel and above. Where a web container is not provided by the runtime, on Nano and the kernel, we use the Equinox HTTP Service to host the admin console.

Java 7 Support

This is boring but important since Java 6 public updates cease in February 2013. The Hudson jobs for Virgo run under Java 7, but we still do local builds and releases under Java 6 to ensure both versions work well.

Kernel Deployer Pathname Reduction

This is the smaller feature to make the lives of Windows users a bit easier and which satisfied a long-standing requirement.

Firstly, the kernel deployer uses shorter paths for storing copies of deployer artefacts.

Secondly, users can configure the kernel deployer to deploy bundles in packed form, which avoids the potentially long paths involved in exploded directories. Deploying in exploded form is still the default because deploying web applications packed changes their behaviour: certain servlet API methods return null when a web application is deployed packed. See "Configuring Deployment" in the section "Configuring the Kernel and User Region" in the Virgo User Guide for details.

Conclusion

All in all Virgo 3.6.0 is a significant release and should make Virgo attractive to a broader range of users and applications. We expect Virgo 3.7.0 to improve on 3.6.0 incrementally and we welcome bug and enhancement reports based on your experience of using 3.6.0.

Can you add your project to the Virgo powered list (on the Virgo home page) in 2013?