Engineering | Andy Wilkinson | July 15, 2009 | ...

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.

New and noteworthy

Integration of the OSGi Web Container reference implementation

dm Server now contains the OSGi Web Container reference implementation and uses and builds upon it for all of its web support. As part of this work we've also moved to using the standard XML format for the configuration of Tomcat in dm Server.

Dump analysis in the Admin Console

A new Dump Inspector has been added to dm Server's admin console. The Dump Inspector can be used to examine diagnostic dumps produced by dm Server's serviceability component.

Using Git as our version control system

We've recently moved dm Server's source code to Git as we felt that we could benefit significantly from Git's distributed nature and its excellent support for branches. If you're interested in accessing dm Server's source code, and in building dm Server from source, instructions for doing so now that the code is hosted in Git can be found below.

Documentation updates

A number of the newly-added features are now covered in the dm Server user guide and programmer guide.

Use of ConfigurationAdmin

dm Server now makes extensive use of ConfigurationAdmin to manage its configuration. This has resulted in changes to dm Server's configuration files and their format. The new files and format are described in the updated user guide.

Updated application development guide

We've updated our guide to creating an enterprise Java application with dm Server to bring it up-to-date with the 2.0 line.

Working with dm Server's source code

dm Server's Git repositories

Repository URL	Contents
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/util.git	General-purpose utility code
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/artifact-repository	Artifact repository
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/osgi-extensions.git	OSGi extensions and Equinox hooks
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/kernel.git	dm Kernel
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/web.git	OSGi Web Container integration and extensions
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/servlet.git	Admin console
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/hosted-repository	Hosted Artifact repository
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/documentation.git	Documentation
git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/dm-server.git	Packaging

Building dm Server from source

Setup

Before you can build dm Server from source, the following will have to be setup on your machine:

Java 6 installed and the JAVA_HOME environment variable configured to point to it
Ant 1.7.1 or later installed
An ANT_OPTS environment variable configured to provide a max heap of at least 512MB, e.g. ANT_OPTS=Xmx512m
Git client

With this setup complete you're ready to build dm Server.

Packaging published binaries

git clone git://git.springsource.org/dm-server/dm-server.git
cd dm-server
git checkout --track 2.0.0.M3 -b 2.0.0.M3
ant…

Pluggable styling with SpringSource Slices

Engineering | Andy Wilkinson | July 10, 2009 | ...

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.

Pluggable styling

I have a standard war file, named styled.host.war, that contains a very simple index.html page:

<html>
	<head>
		<title>SpringSource Slices Pluggable Styling Demonstration</title>
		<link rel="StyleSheet" href="styles/main.css" type="text/css" />
	</head>
	<body>
		<div class="header">
			<div class="title">SpringSource Slices</div>
			<div class="subtitle">Pluggable Styling Demonstration</div>
		</div>
	</body>
</html>

As you can see, it's looking for a CSS file…

Using Yourkit to Find a Memory Leak

Engineering | Dave Syer | July 05, 2009 | ...

I had such a great experience today with Yourkit that I thought I'd write a quick plug. It's been a couple of years since I used it in anger, and even then it was the best tool I could find, but now it really is ultra slick. I haven't done an exhaustive survey of the marketplace, and that wasn't the object of the exercise: I just wanted a tool to solve a problem.

Here's the story of my day; frustration, then irritation, then finally satisfaction. I had a suspected memory leak in Spring Batch and I needed to track it down quickly. The back story to this is I've seen plenty of memory leaks, but I haven't had to deal with one at the coal face for quite some time. I live in STS these days (sometimes dream in it as well), so I needed a tool that worked well in the IDE. I tried two tools, but only because the first choice didn't work. The two I tried were TPTP and Yourkit…

STS 2.1.0.RC1 Updated for Eclipse 3.5

Releases | Adam Fitzgerald | June 26, 2009 | ...

The latest release candidate for SpringSource Tool Suite has been updated to run on the brand new Eclipse Galileo release. STS 2.1.0.RC1 includes support for Spring Roo, SpringSource dm Server and tc Server, enterprise OSGi tools, as well as all the usual great Spring development tools. This newest version also provides support for a Mac OS X 64 bit Cocoa client. Of course the download for SpringSource Tool Suite is free so get started with the best IDE for enterprise Java development today.

Download | New Feature List | Forum | JIRA

Installing STS into Eclipse 3.5

Engineering | Christian Dupuis | June 24, 2009 | ...

Today marks a big day for Eclipse and for everybody involved with the Eclipse ecosystem: Congratulations to the Eclipse folks for releasing Eclipse 3.5 aka Galileo. You can read more about the release at http://www.eclipse.org/galileo/. I encourage everybody to download Eclipse 3.5 today and try it out.

Since SpringSource is strongly committed to Eclipse and we are building our SpringSource Tool Suite on top of the Eclipse technology stack, I'm excited to report that STS can be installed and used with 3.5. Here are some instructions to get started:

Update: The instructions in this post are outdated and might not work for you. Please refer to the STS Installation Instructions…

Maven PAR Plugin 1.0.0.M1

Engineering | Ben Hale | June 24, 2009 | ...

Shortly after the introduction of SpringSource dm Server (Application Platform at the time), Thorsten Maus created a Maven plugin for creating PAR files. This was a great community contribution and we even used it in the Getting Started Guide for dm Server 1.0.x.

As dm Server's 2.0 milestones have progressed we've been adding new functionality to the PAR file. The most interesting feature is that now a PAR file can contain more than just JAR files. With the introduction of OSGi RFC 66, the dm Server has deprecated Web Modules in favor of the standard Web Container files using a .war…

Messaging meets OSGi at OSGi DevCon Europe

Engineering | Iwein Fuld | June 23, 2009 | ...

Yesterday I was speaking at OSGi DevCon Europe about using Spring Integration and dm Server to tackle common problems in large applications in a pragmatic way. Before and after my session I talked to various people that liked to have a little more information about these ideas. This blog will give an overview of what I talked about.

I'll jump right in with a summary of the presentation.

Any project will grow during its lifetime of active development. Usually developers add features and fix problems raised by the product owners by adding code. This process will naturally grow the code base…

OSGi Test Stubs 1.0.0.M1

Engineering | Ben Hale | June 23, 2009 | ...

I'm pleased to announce the 1.0.0.M1 release of SpringSource's OSGi Test Stubs. These stubs offer a way to unit test complex OSGi Framework interactions without needing a full OSGi container.

Package - Download
Git - git://git.springsource.org/osgi-test-stubs/osgi-test-stubs.git

The Problem

As the dm Server team has been developing, we found that one of the biggest problem areas for testing for us was in BundleActivators. Our BundleActivators do quite a bit of publishing services to the service registry as well as consuming services using ServiceTrackers. These kinds of tasks involve many interwoven calls to BundleContexts, Bundles, ServiceRegistrations, and ServiceReferences. In the beginning, these activators were simple enough that not much unit testing was done on them, and we depended on integration tests to catch any bugs that were introduced. As time went on though, the activators became more complex and unit testing became a more pressing need. We started using EasyMock for these tests, but found that they were very complex, hard to maintain, and most importantly hard to understand.

@Test
public void startAndStop() throws Exception {
    BundleActivator bundleActivator = new DumpBundleActivator();
    BundleContext context = createMock(BundleContext.class);
    Filter filter = createMock(Filter.class);
    
    String filterString = "(objectClass=" + DumpContributor.class.getName() + ")";
    
    expect(context.createFilter(filterString)).andReturn(filter);
    context…

dm Server Repository Content via JMX

Engineering | Ben Hale | June 22, 2009 | ...

In the dm Server 2.0.0.M1 release we added support for shared repositories. As a followup to this new functionality, we've added support for browsing those repositories via JMX.

Connecting to a running dm Server instance with a JMX client now shows you a Repository group. Under this group, each configured repository (with the exception of chained repositories) has a bean that returns synopses of all of the artifacts contained inside. The bean also exposes a method for returning the entire, detailed ArtifactDescriptor for a given bean based on it's type, name, and version.

JMX Repository Browsing

Obviously, something like JConsole is mostly useful for displaying small targeted amounts of data. For larger datasets, the AMS team is currently working on visualization that is a bit easier on the eyes.

Modular Web Applications with SpringSource Slices

Engineering | Rob Harrop | June 22, 2009 | ...

Updated: added sub module instructions for Git.

I've talked in the past about providing support for truly modular applications, and I'm pleased to announce that you can now access the early prototype code of SpringSource Slices.

Building and Installing

You can access the source code from our Git repository:

git clone git://git.springsource.org/slices/slices.git
git submodule init
git submodule update

To build a packaged version of Slices simply run ant clean jar package from the build-slices directory:

cd slices/build-slices
ant clean jar package

This will result in a zip file in target/artifacts that contains the Slices subsystem which can then be installed on top of dm Server 2.0

Installing Slices is simply a matter of adding the new subsystem to dm Server and then updating dmServer's profile to start the new subsystem. Slices should work with any recent dm Server 2.0 snapshot build. Here I'm using 2.0.0.CI-R326-B274 which I've already downloaded and unzipped on my desktop:

 unzip target/artifacts/springsource-slices-BUILD-20090622083953.zip -d ~/Desktop/springsource-dm-server-2.0.0.CI-R326-B274

Next, dm Server's kernel.properties configuration must be updated to include the new slices subsystem. Open your dm Server installation's config/kernel.properties file, and edit the Profile Configuration section to list the slices subsystem and to give the profile a suitable name (I've called it slices):

#######################
# Profile Configuration
#######################
profile.name=slices…

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dm Server 2.0 M3