If you want to understand at a strategic level what the implications of VMware’s recently announced acquisition of SpringSource are, there are several good sources, including Steve Herrod’s (CTO of VMware) blog post, Rod Johnson’s commentary, Paul Maritz’s press and analyst call, and Darryl Taft’s insightful piece in eWeek.

In this post I will focus more on what this all means at a technical level, to give you an idea of the kinds of capabilities you can look forward to.

Firstly, let me reiterate that nothing changes with respect to our open source projects and  SpringSource product offerings. Nothing changes that is, apart from the fact that we’ll have even more opportunity in the future to add exciting new features to them. Spring 3.0 is coming soon, and we just released milestone 4. dm Server is making rapid progress towards a 2.0 release, and we have some very cool stuff up our sleeves for a forthcoming release of tc Server. The Eclipse tool support for Groovy is generating masses of interest, Grails is pushing on towards a 1.2 release…

Today I want to share some exciting news. We have signed a definitive agreement with VMware, who will acquire SpringSource. Subject to regulatory approval, we expect the transaction to close in Q3. SpringSource will become a division within VMware. I will continue to lead SpringSource, reporting to VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

Today I would like to explain the vision and careful reasoning behind this deal: why it’s natural and logical; why it can lead to the creation of amazing technology that will immensely benefit users; why it’s good for Spring and other technologies SpringSource leads or contributes to; why it’s good for the Spring community…

I'm pleased to announce a new screencast for SpringSource Slices. This screencast walks through the creation of the menu-bar sample application. It shows how a host can use a collection of slices to populate a menu bar dynamically without restarting and can be completely de-coupled from the knowledge of exactly what items might be in the menu-bar. In addition, the slices only provide their specific content, and include formatting and other window content from the host bundle.

Slice Menu Bar (5:19)

• QuickTime (24.1 MB)

Source Code

• Package - Download
• Git - git://git.springsource.org/slices/slices.git

I'm happy to announce that we just released the final version of SpringSource Tool Suite 2.1.0; the first GA version with major enhancements since making STS freely available.

The release comes with brand-new installers for all supported platforms and bundles latest versions of SpringSource tc and dm Server as well as Spring Roo. Additionally you can choose between distributions based on Eclipse 3.4 and the recently released 3.5 aka Eclipse Galileo.

Because we've seen lots of interest in the new Groovy tools we also offer a bundled download of STS and the Groovy Eclipse Plugin.

Features

The list of new features in STS is long and we already covered some of them in previous blog posts. Review the New & Noteworthy…

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.

New and noteworthy

dm Server now embeds Medic: our OSGi serviceability project

• The logging support is now based on LogBack which means that users now have complete control over the format of log output and have the complete range of LogBack's appenders available to them.
• Support for serviceability dumps is now fully extensible. User code running in dm Server can now contribute to serviceability dumps simply by publishing a DumpContributor implementation to the service registry.
• Event log support (the coded messages that are output to the console) is also available to user code. Event log entries can be generated using an EventLogger which can be obtained from the service registry.

We'll be blogging more about Medic, covering how to use it both in dm Server and in plain OSGi, in the coming weeks.

Support for deploying properties files

Admin console enhancements

In addition to the enhancements that…

Update: 15-Aug-09: Comments are now closed.  If you want help installing or to give feedback or ask questions, please join the mailing list ( archive )

For the last couple of months SpringSource has been actively involved in developing the next version of the Eclipse Groovy Tools.  The initial goal has been to evolve them from where they are into a highly optimized environment for the key developer tasks of code development, building and testing. Ideally the experience when working with mixed Groovy/Java projects should feel as good as it does for pure Java projects in Eclipse.

This week the first version of the code has been committed into the codehaus repository and shortly milestone 1 will be released.  An update site (for Eclipse 3.4.2) is available that contains the current development build: http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.4 .  Yes, currently there is no Eclipse 3.5 build of this code yet, but there will be very soon.  (Update! 31-Jul-09 Eclipse 3.5 update site now available at: http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.5…

In April of this year, SpringSource made generally available our first release of tc Server, version 6.0.19.A. The product has been a huge success, in part due to being based on the tried and true Apache Tomcat base which many, many people (and more and more all the time) are using every day. As outlined in an earlier blog post when we introduced 6.0.19.A, we've extended that tried and true core with extensions that make it easier to use and provide key production oriented extensions to Tomcat. And we've surrounded that solid base with the enterprise, production class management and…

Introduction

Spring Integration is a POJO-based light weight, embeddable messaging framework with a loosely coupled programming model aimed to simplify integration of heterogeneous systems based on Enterprise Integration Patterns and without requiring a separate ESB-like engine or proprietary development and deployment environment. On the other hand, OSGi is a paradigm that allows one to compose loosely coupled systems from independent modules called OSGi Bundles. Composing systems from the set of independently developed modules might not be such a new paradigm, we've been doing it (hopefully) for a…

New Features

A set of updates to the SpringSource dm Server Admin Console are available in the nightly builds. This also shows the use of Plans and the RFC66 Web container. There are two new features available, the first lets you look at any service dumps that the dm Server system may have produced and the second lets you explore the state of bundles within OSGi.

A dump may contain many dump items such as stack traces, thread dumps, depending on the initial cause. Dump items are available for viewing in the Admin Console, simply select the dump of interest on the left and then the dump item on the right…