dm Server 2.0.0.M4 has been released, and is now available for download. We've made a lot of progress since 2.0.0.M3, adding a number of new features upon which the users tracking the nightly builds have already given us some excellent feedback. Take a look at the M4 release notes if you're interested in seeing everything that we've been working on. Please keep your feedback coming as comments on our blog, in the forums, and on JIRA. We'll be blogging more about Medic, covering how to use it both in dm Server and in plain OSGi, in the coming weeks. In addition to the enhancements that Chris…

dm Server 2.0.0.M3 has been released, and is now available for download. In the sprints since 2.0.0.M3, we've made significant progress towards the final release, both in terms of new features, and in defect fixes. Take a look at the M3 release notes if you're interested in seeing everything that we've been working on. Please keep your feedback coming as comments on our blog, in the forums, and on JIRA. With this setup complete you're ready to build dm Server. The build will download all of the bundles that comprise the 2.0.0.M3 release of dm Server and package them into a install binary. You…

Since we announced SpringSource Slices, a number of users and customers have asked about using Slices to make the styling and branding of their Web sites pluggable. In this blog, I'll demonstrate how easy it is with Slices. As you can see, it's looking for a CSS file named styles/main.css. Without a slice in place, this file doesn't exist. Deploying the war to dm Server shows that the page is unstyled: The page can easily be styled by deploying a Slice that specifies the styled host war as its host and provides the required stylesheet: Now if we look at the page, its appearance has changed…

As Rob mentioned in his introduction to the OSGi Web Container, dm Server automatically imports system packages into Web bundles. This has proved very useful, especially when deploying existing WAR files into an OSGi environment. I've recently spent some time moving this functionality from dm Server's Web subsystem into the OSGi Web Container RI. This blog describes the new functionality, and how to make use of it. There are two ways in which you can instruct the RI to import all of the exported system packages. When you install a Web bundle, you can now use the SpringSource-SystemPackages URL…

dm Server 2.0.0.M2 has been released, and is now available for download. In the two sprints since 2.0.0.M1, we've made significant progress towards the final release, both in terms of new features, and in defect fixes. Take a look at the M2 release notes if you're interested in seeing everything that we've been working on. Please keep your feedback coming as comments on our blog, in the forums, and on JIRA. Here's some example configuration for a watched repository:

One of the main advantages of the SpringSource Application Platform is its ability to provision dependencies on an as-needed basis. The benefits of this are two-fold: it ensures that the Platform's memory footprint is as small as possible and it allows applications to be deployed without encapsulating all of their dependencies in a monolithic deployment unit, e.g. a WAR file. To take advantage of these capabilities you will require an understanding of the Platform's provisioning repository and this blog intends to provide just that. When a deployed application is started by the Platform its…