Gemini Blueprint 1.0.1.M01

Gemini Blueprint 1.0.1.M01 is available for download. The main highlight is the support for Spring 3.1.x. A full list of bugs in the milestone is here.

Kudos to Aaron Whiteside for providing the vast majority of the changes for this milestone. He is in the process of becoming a committer for Gemini Blueprint.

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.

Incremental OSGi with Virgo, Gemini, and Libra

As I anticipate the start of EclipseCon 2011 later today, I'm reflecting on the current state of the Eclipse Virgo, Gemini, and Libra projects.

As I'll be discussing on Tuesday, Virgo evolved out of a relatively mature project whose aim was to make it easy for enterprise applications and enterprise application developers to adopt OSGi. The goal was to make the transition to OSGi incremental. Essentially you can start with a standard WAR file and deploy it to Virgo as-is. Then you can incrementally refactor the WAR file into an application comprising multiple OSGi bundles while continuing to use familiar technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, JPA, etc. We based Virgo on Tomcat suitably embedded into OSGi, again to provide familiarity for enterprise developers as well as systems administrators.

In parallel with the evolution of Virgo, the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group, being discussed on Tuesday, produced a series of enterprise specifications again with the goal of enabling enterprise applications to be migrate straightforwardly to OSGi. The reference implementations of these specifications became today's Eclipse Gemini project:

• Gemini Blueprint - an OSGi standard dependency injection container which also supports the popular Spring and Spring DM namespaces
• Gemini Web - support for servlets in the form of OSGi standard Web Application Bundles (WABs) or standard WAR files
• Gemini JPA - support for JPA persistence in OSGi
• Gemini DBAccess - modularised JDBC drivers for use in OSGi
• Gemini Management - JMX management for OSGi
• Gemini Naming - support for JNDI naming in OSGi

Until recently, integrating the Gemini projects into Virgo has been a fairly specialised skill. As we'll see in a workshop on Thursday, things are now really starting to come together and Gemini Blueprint, Gemini Web, and various other Gemini components can now be deployed and used in Virgo. We'll also be touching on how to manage and configure WABs in Virgo as part of a workshop later this morning.

So much for the past. What about the future? The primary goal of Virgo 3.0 is better integration with other EclipseRT technologies such as Equinox, Jetty, and p2. This will provide richer function and greater choice for enterprise applications as they migrate to OSGi. We'll be hearing about how Virgo and EclipseRT technologies work together on Wednesday. The recently released third milestone of this release shows the progress towards the goal of better integration with EclipseRT:

• Virgo now uses Equinox Configuration Admin and Event Admin services instead of their Apache equivalents.
• Virgo has moved to the new framework hooks model for isolation in Equinox which is part of the OSGi 4.3 standard soon to be issued for public review.
• Virgo now provides two web servers: Virgo Tomcat Server, which continues to be based on Gemini Web, and Virgo Jetty Server. Some exciting technology for modularising the view portion of web applications is also emerging into the Virgo mainstream as we'll hear on Wednesday.
• p2 support in Virgo is also making good progress although this is currently in prototype form.

Development tooling is also entering an exciting new phase which will greatly help applications migrate to enterprise OSGi:

• The Libra project, which will be presented on Wednesday, is providing development tooling for building WABs and will ship in the Eclipse Indigo release train later this year.
• The Virgo development tooling has entered the Eclipse IP process and will soon emerge in the Virgo project. Over time, the standards-based features of the Virgo tooling will be factored out and migrated into Libra.
• OSGi runtime launchers are also being contributed to Libra. I would hope to see a Virgo launcher for Libra emerge so that Libra can start to take over from the Virgo tooling for many aspects of enterprise OSGi application development.

If you're attending EclipesCon, come and hear the talks, join in the workshops and BoFs and help to shape incremental OSGi in the Virgo, Gemini, and Libra projects.