Managing plugins with Grails 1.3

Engineering | Peter Ledbrook | May 18, 2010 | ...

For a long time, managing Grails dependencies simply meant putting them in your application's lib directory. Then came Grails 1.2 and the dependency DSL: you could finally declare your dependencies and have Grails automatically download them and make them available to your app. Great!

Now, Grails 1.3 has brought the dependency DSL to the realm of plugins.

So what?

Users have often faced two issues with the plugin system up till now:
  1. setting up a suitable Subversion server to act as a Grails plugin repository is not simple; and
  2. you can't control what dependencies a plugin brings into your application.
The first of these doesn't particularly apply to individual developers, but it's a bigger deal for companies where access to the internet may be restricted or where they want more control over the "latest" versions of libraries and plugins. How much better it would be if they could use a repository manager like Nexus or Artifactory.

As for the dependencies, some plugins include libraries you don't need or (even worse) break your application. With the dependency DSL, you can explicitly exclude problematic libraries.

Those are some of the reasons why this change might be…

Grails 1.3 Released

Engineering | Graeme Rocher | May 11, 2010 | ...

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Grails 1.3! Followers of Grails releases will recall that it has not been long since the last major release of Grails (Grails 1.2 was released in December), but given the need to get the latest and greatest version of Groovy in the hands of developers, Grails 1.3 can be seen as the Groovy 1.7 release. The Groovy team did a fantastic job in bringing all sorts of excellent new additions to the Groovy language such as annonymous inner/nested classes, an AST builder and power asserts (my personal favourite), all of which are now available in…

Spring Web Flow 2.1.0 Milestone 1 Released

Releases | Rossen Stoyanchev | May 07, 2010 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the availability of Spring Web Flow 2.1.0 M1.

Download | Change Log

This release is built on Spring 3.0.2, Spring Security 3.0.2, Tiles 2.1.2, and Portlet API 2.0. It features use of Spring EL as the default expression language as well as integration with the new type conversion and formatting system available in Spring 3.

The 2.1.0 release will have two milestones with the first release candidate scheduled for two weeks from today. Feedback and comments at this point are welcome.

SpringSource To Acquire GemStone Data Management

Engineering | Rod Johnson | May 06, 2010 | ...

Another week, another important announcement. The SpringSource division of VMware today announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, a leader in data grid technology.

This acquisition, like our recent acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, adds another crucial building block of private and public cloud to our middleware portfolio. Like Rabbit and SpringSource and VMware’s other products, GemStone technology is valuable in both today’s enterprise scenarios and tomorrow’s cloud world. The acquisition also adds an important middleware capability to our…

VMforce Provides Spring Cloud Platform

Engineering | Rod Johnson | April 27, 2010 | ...

VMware and Salesforce today announced a partnership to build an enterprise Java cloud called VMforce. The announcement is understandably receiving a lot of attention in the wider industry context, but today I’d like to focus on the central role of SpringSource technology in the new platform and the unique and compelling benefits it brings developers in the Spring community.

What is VMforce?

VMforce is a joint service from VMware and SalesForce. VMforce uses the Force.com physical infrastructure to run vSphere with a special customized vCloud layer that allows for seamless scaling and management. Above this layer VMforce runs SpringSource tc Server instances that provide the execution environment for the enterprise applications that run on VMforce. Spring applications can store their own enterprise data in the Force.com database or use data already resident there. All of these architecture details are seamlessly integrated into a single platform that allows the developer to interact with the server in the way they would with a local tc Server or Tomcat instance.
vmforceCloud

Developing Spring Applications on VMforce

To ensure that developers are productive with this new platform and able to use their existing skillset, we are building integration with SpringSource Tool Suite that lets developers treat their VMforce account like a simple local Tomcat instance with incredible scalability. Like the rest of STS, the integration will be free.

The STS/VMforce integration means that you can drag and drop applications to deploy them to the platform and take advantage of incremental redeployment to do rapid round trip development even though the platform is…

Spring Web Flow 2.0.9 Released

Releases | Keith Donald | April 15, 2010 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 2.0.9 is now available. Download | Reference Documentation | Change Log

This release includes a number of minor bug fixes, as well as an update to the version of Dojo that addresses a Dojo security vulnerability.

In addition to 2.0.x maintenance, the Web Flow project team is currently working on a 2.1 release that provides a current generation version of Web Flow that builds on Spring 3. At the same time, work is continuing towards the first 3.0 milestone for the next generation Web Flow. Watch for future announcements…

SpringSource Hops On Cloud Messaging with RabbitMQ

Engineering | Rod Johnson | April 13, 2010 | ...

I am delighted to announce that the SpringSource division of VMware has acquired Rabbit Technologies Ltd., the company behind the popular open source cloud messaging technology RabbitMQ. This acquisition will enhance our middleware portfolio and accelerate our cloud initiatives.

Messaging Evolution in the Cloud

As organizations increasingly build and deploy applications in a cloud environment, the infrastructure to support this new model is evolving. A new type of lightweight, reliable, scalable and portable messaging system is required to support the routing of user requests to the appropriate resources regardless of where they may reside. RabbitMQ is a leader in this field and has demonstrated significant innovation around cloud messaging.

RabbitMQ is well suited for the cloud for three main reasons:

  • Open: RabbitMQ is open source, has an open and active community, and is based on open standards. Openness will be a critical factor for successful cloud platforms because moving to the cloud loses a lot of its appeal if it turns out to be just another version of vendor lock-in.
  • Flexible Scalability: RabbitMQ is capable of scaling in multiple different ways, not just technical horizontal scaling but also federated messaging that spans cross service scaling all the way up to geographically diverse scaling.
  • Protocol based: RabbitMQ is a protocol based, rather than API based, messaging system. This means that messaging clients are not tied to vendor installed libraries which increases portability for applications and allows for client messaging from a wide variety of different platforms. This approach also allows RabbitMQ to support multiple protocols which increases its utility in heterogeneous environments like the cloud.

Indeed, Rabbit's suitability for cloud scenarios is already borne out in practice by its adoption by cloud service providers and organizations building private clouds, such as NASA Nebula.

What does this mean for you?

If you are a member of the RabbitMQ community, this is good news, and a significant further validation for your technical choice. RabbitMQ will continue to be open source and distributed in the same way as before. The community can expect to see increased investment in this outstanding technology which should result in significant improvements to the open source release. The RabbitMQ community can also expect to see the same dedication and support that SpringSource gives to its other open source communities like Spring, Grails, Groovy and Apache based technologies.

We love and are committed to the diversity of languages and…

Uploading Job Configurations to Spring Batch Admin

Engineering | Dave Syer | April 08, 2010 | ...

An interesting problem that has no universal good solution is: how do I change the configuration of a running Spring application? Spring Batch Admin 1.0.0.M3 was released recently, and it has a configuration upload feature that solves this problem in a particular way. Someone asked for this feature at the recent S2GForum in Munich (if you missed that sign up for events in London and Amsterdam in May), and I was happy to tell him that it already existed, so maybe it deserves a bit more air time...

Screenshots of the Basic Use Case

Jobs View Before Upload We start with a look at the Jobs view in the application. It shows a list of jobs that are either launchable or monitorable by the web application.

Now the plan is to upload a new Job configuration and see this view change. So we start with…

Spring Framework 3.0.2 released

Engineering | Juergen Hoeller | April 02, 2010 | ...

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 3.0.2 is available now, including more than 100 fixes for user-reported issues. Get it from our download page.

Spring 3.0.2 catches up with recent third-party releases such as Hibernate 3.5 final, OpenJPA 2.0 beta 3, Hessian 4.0.3, and JasperReports 3.7. In addition, this release introduces web support refinements (e.g. the new HttpEntity class) and fixes a couple of regressions.

We recommend upgrading to Spring 3.0.2 from all previous Spring 3.0 releases - for both development and production use. If you are currently using Spring 2.5, the 3.0.…

SpringSource dm Server 2.0.1 Released

Engineering | Glyn Normington | April 01, 2010 | ...

SpringSource dm Server 2.0.1 is released today.

The release fixes a few minor bugs and one security issue. The Admin Console's version of dojo is upgraded from 1.3.2 to 1.3.3 to prevent an open redirect attack.

The release also includes the final Reference Implementation of the OSGi Web Container. The OSGi Web Container specification was recently released by the OSGi Alliance as part of the OSGi 4.2 Enterprise Specification.

No further releases of dm Server are planned as the project is being donated to the Eclipse Foundation as Virgo. We aim to ship a baseline release of Virgo in due course…

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