Introduction

Last week, Mark Fisher introduced you to the new restructured and simplified Spring Integration samples that came out with the new release of Spring Integration 1.0.3 and so far the feedback was very positive. Beside restructuring and simplifying existing samples we've introduced few new samples with the goal of demonstrating some of the benefits of running Spring Integration on OSGi-based platforms. In this blog using very trivial, yet powerful example we're going to look at some of the benefits of Spring Integration and OSGi when used together to address dynamic nature of  today's enterprise.

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…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that the Spring Integration 1.0.3 release is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | Change Log

In addition to the links above, check out this blog post to get up and running with our new-and-improved, self-contained, Maven-enabled samples!

Mark Fisher
Spring Integration Lead

Spring Integration 1.0.3 is now available. You can find links to the download, reference manual, and more at the Spring Integration home. This release includes quite a few changes, but in this blog, I'm going to focus on one in particular. Starting with this version, the samples are fully self-contained and Maven-enabled. That means you can download the distribution, go into the 'samples' directory, run 'mvn install' and then import the projects into a Maven-aware Eclipse instance, such as the SpringSource Tool Suite. Here's the step-by-step breakdown...

Installing and Running the Samples

1. Make sure you have Maven installed and in your path (2.0.9 or later is required). If not, download it and follow the setup instructions: http://maven.apache.org
2. If you don't already have a Maven-aware version of Eclipse, you can download the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) which will support these projects out-of-the-box (STS even includes support for the OSGi-enabled samples). Alternatively, you can manually add a Maven plugin, such as m2eclipse to an existing Eclipse installation.
3. Download the Spring Integration Samples and unzip.
4. Within the unzipped "samples" directory, run 'mvn install'. You should eventually see output similar to the following:
5. Once STS/Eclipse is up and running, choose 'File -> Import...' and within the Wizard choose 'General -> Existing Projects into Workspace'. Then browse to the unzipped 'samples' directory, and you will see all of the projects selected by default: Either accept all or choose the individual sample(s) that you want to import, and after a few moments of workspace building, you should be ready to run.*

*NOTE: if you import the 'osgi-inbound' project, you will see some errors on that particular project (but you should not see any errors on the other projects after the workspace build completes). Those errors would be resolved after configuring the runtime and the bundle repository. If you would like to work through the OSGi samples, refer to the dedicated chapter in the Reference Manual…

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

The easiest way to build a packaged dm Server zip file is to build one from existing binaries that have already been published:

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…

Some of you may have noticed that in recent posts that the dm Server team has been referencing Git repository URLs. The team has been migrating all of its source code and I'm now pleased to announce that this migration is done. The list below contains the Git URLs for the code managed by the dm Server team. If you were referencing the equivalent repositories in SVN, please clone these new repos instead.

This announcement only covers code managed by the dm Server team, and not the entirety of the Spring portfolio. Other projects will be converting at their own pace and the Subversion…

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…

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…

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.

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