I am happy to announce the first milestone release of the Spring GemFire project, the newest member in the Spring family. Spring GemFire (for short SGF) brings the Spring concepts and programming model to GemFire, SpringSource's distributed data management platform. The release is available for both Java and .NET. The features in 1.0.0.M1 include: We look forward to your feedback!

Hot on the heels of the STS on Eclipse 3.6 and Gemini Web milestone announcements, I am glad to report that the first milestone of Gemini Blueprint is available for download. Part of the Gemini project, Blueprint builds on top of the Spring Dynamic Modules v2 code base and is the Reference Implementation for the OSGi 4.2 Blueprint specification. Besides the changes reflecting the transition to the Eclipse Foundation, 1.0.0.M1 code base has been upgraded to the latest Spring framework release. Gemini Blueprint is dual licensed under Apache License and Eclipse Public License. While the migration…

Last month, almost 4 years after the initial 4.0 release, OSGi Alliance officially approved the OSGi service platform 4.2 release. The announcement headline featured the Blueprint Container Service, a new addition to the Compendium specification based on the programming model promoted by the Spring Dynamic Modules (also known as Spring OSGi) project. To quickly summarize Blueprint, I will just blatantly quote the OSGi spec: Users familiar with IoC concepts or Spring and Spring DM configuration, will find the Blueprint specification easy to grasp. In fact, being derived from Spring DM, many of…

A fairly common question that I get from time to time is how to go about using JDK specific classes inside an OSGi environment. To some degree, this is equivalent to getting access to the bootstrapping classpath from OSGi, without bundling it. To express package dependencies, bundles use the OSGi directive inside their manifests - mainly Export-Package and Import-Package for providing and demanding, a respectively, a class package dependency. Defining a bundle wiring is a crucial step for creating a modular application; however there are cases, as the issue above, where the needed package is…

Since the first milestones of Spring Dynamic Modules, requests for running web applications in OSGi started to come in. It has been probably one of the most requested features and no wonder, once 1.0 final was released, web support has been the main focus of the 1.1 branch. I am pleased to report that, with the just released M2, as already hinted by Juergen, Spring-DM supports not just vanilla wars (available since 1.1.0 M1) but also Spring-MVC applications running inside OSGi. In this entry, I would like to briefly discuss the typical OSGi web scenario and Spring-DM's approach. But first, As…

Below is an example, taken from Spring 2.5.x core bundle manifest that uses some of the headers mentioned above: which indicates specifies the packages discovered in the jar (on the left side) and its imports (on the right side). . This section is a good indication on what packages the given jar imports. Let's OSGify the artifact by using

As most of you already know by now, Spring is not just about XML as lately, a number of 'official' extensions to the core offer alternatives way for configuring the container. Spring Java Configuration 1.0 M2 was among the products released around JavaOne and, while still marked as a milestone, had an important number of updates and bugfixes: In fact, most of the work done for 1.0 M2 was incorporating the feedback received to the initial announcement; thanks a lot to everybody involved! In this entry, I'd like to give some examples of Java Configuration, as a true IoC annotation-based…

Welcome to my blog! This is my first entry...ever. I manage to resist the urge of blogging but since so many people encouraged me to write about what I do at i21 I decided to give it a go. This and the fact that the Spring-OSGi had its first release yesterday evening (EET time zone). I've been involved with Spring-OSGi since August last year and it has been quite a ride. It's one of the most challenging projects I have worked on and I'm glad to have it released, even as a milestone, to the public. Thanks a lot to everybody involved for making this happen, especially my team mates - Adrian…