Eclipse Bundle Recipes project to supersede SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository (EBR)

IBM, Paremus, Rebaze, Red Hat, and VMware/SpringSource, with interested parties Peter Kriens and SAP, have submitted an Eclipse Bundle Recipes project proposal aiming to provide a repository of OSGi bundle templates for open source JARs. The intention is that this will supersede the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository (EBR).

It's been nearly a couple of years since we made the templates from the SpringSource EBR available on github. Apart from several pull requests from Raman Gupta (a.k.a. rocketraman, pictured below), not much appeared to happen...

In fact, quite a lot was happening behind the scenes. I was in touch with various colleagues in other companies to see if there was interest in creating a community-based replacement for the SpringSource EBR. It turned out that several large vendors did want to join in, but some of them were very cautious about the licenses of the JAR files that the project would handle. For this reason, we went in the direction of a project to host just the manifest templates.

Clearly, this wasn't going to be much use to people needing to download OSGi bundles, so we also discussed how to make the resultant bundles available. One approach was to generate the bundles on the client machine to cope with most, if not all, open source licenses. The downside of this is the potential lack of reproducibility each time a bundle is generated.

The more people we talked to, the more interest there was in storing the generated bundles in Maven Central. It turns out this is exactly what the Pax Tipi project over at OPS4J started doing last year. So we hope to build on their experience, but perhaps achieve a higher profile.

So the plan is to collaborate on templates at the Eclipse Bundle Recipes project, but also have these published to Maven Central. The details need to be worked out, but now that the Eclipse project proposal has been submitted, we can finally talk about this in public. The project fits naturally into the Eclipse Runtime umbrella project.

Interestingly, another resource for people wanting to add OSGi manifests to existing project has recently become available - the metadata advice bugzilla category at the OSGi Alliance. This should be a valuable resource for anyone wanting to develop a high quality OSGi manifest for a third party JAR.

So the scene is finally set for some progress on superseding the SpringSource EBR. Watch this space or, better still, keep an eye on the Eclipse Bundle Recipes project and or get involved. There's a discussion topic on the proposals forum if you want to comment.

Virgo Community Survey

It's a couple of years since we ran the first Virgo survey and the project has moved on a lot since then. So we've just published a new Eclipse Virgo Community Survey. If you use Virgo, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to complete the survey. If you are short of time, please just fill in the first six questions and skip the rest.

Question 12 is a fun quiz about the use of OSGi in application servers. You'll probably find it interesting even if you have no interest in Virgo. We'll provide the answers in a few weeks time along with the survey results.

Here's the survey if you want to get going right away.

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?

Virgo 3.0.2 released

Virgo 3.0.2 is available for download. Please see the release notes for details of this bug fix release.

Eclipse Dance Steps

Sometime Eclipse fails to work as expected. The following 'dances', in increasing order of desperation, may help. Remember to maintain a fixed grin throughout and try not to tread on your own toes.

Refresh and clean all projects ("Quickstep")

Click on a project in the Package Explorer. Hit Apple-A (or Ctrl-A) to select all projects. Hit F5 to refresh. Select Project->Clean..., select "Clean all projects", and click Ok.

Open and close all projects ("Foxtrot")

Click on a project in the Package Explorer. Hit Apple-A (or Ctrl-A) to select all projects. Right click the projects and select "Close Project". Right click the projects again and select "Open Project".

Open and close all projects restarting Eclipse in between ("Tango")

Click on a project in the Package Explorer. Hit Apple-A (or Ctrl-A) to select all projects. Right click the projects and select "Close Project". Restart Eclipse. Click on a project in the Package Explorer. Hit Apple-A (or Ctrl-A) to select all projects. Right click the projects again and select "Open Project".

Delete and re-import all projects ("Paso Doble")

Click on a project in the Package Explorer. Hit Apple-A (or Ctrl-A) to select all projects. Press the delete key, select "Do not delete contents", and click Ok. Right click in the Package Explorer and select Import..., then choose General and "Existing Projects into Workspace" and click Next. Browse to select the platform checkout directory and click Choose. Select all the projects for import. Click Finish.

Rebuild the search indices ("Slow Waltz")

Exit the workbench and delete the Java search index:

• go into \plugins\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.jdt.core
• delete 'savedIndexNames.txt'
• delete all *.index
  Restart

If all else fails

If you're still stuck, try the "Hokey Cokey" by repeating all of the above until you've had enough.

Virgo contribution underway

I just finished entering the main CQs (Contribution Questionnaires) for Virgo. The corresponding tracking bugs, which are visible to everyone, are at the bottom of the list here.

There are now two gating factors before we can commit the code: the workload of the small but committed Eclipse legal team and my team's ability to field any issues they raise...



Once we've gotten the code committed, it will be possible to others to clone the git repositories, build, test, develop improvements, and submit patches. Essentially we'll be in business as far as contributors and build-it-yourself users are concerned.

Later, when we've also gotten the 3rd party dependencies through the legal process, we'll be able to start doing releases out of eclipse.org.

EclipseCon 2010 Virgo Presentation

Eclipse Virgo

View more presentations from glynnormington.

Jeff McAffer's blog

Jeff is a colleague from Eclipse who often has an interesting perspective. You may be interested in his new blog or the first post on provisioning changes in Eclipse.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jeff!

Oracle TopLink being donated to Eclipse

BJ posted a really interesting development from EclipseCon. Oracle is donating a sophisticated persistence framework to Eclipse.

I can't tell from the FAQ whether the framework consists of 'pure' OSGi bundles or whether they make use of any Eclipse-specific features, but clearly the former would be ideal.

OSGi at EclipseCon

Next month's EclipseCon features an OSGi track for the first time.

One of my close colleagues, Tim Ellison, will be talking about Apache Harmony, including its use of OSGi.

Another close colleague, BJ Hargrave, is co-leading a seminar on Spring-OSGi integration.

BEA are presenting their experiences of using OSGi to underpin the microService Architecture, while JBoss are presenting on their thoughts for how they could use OSGi.

All in all, sounds fascinating...