Over the past few months, the community has shown a great deal of interest in dm Server. The forums are very active and we always have stimulating discussions when presenting at conferences. We've noticed that a lot of the same questions come up as users start developing their first applications for dm Server, and so we've put together a Getting Started Guide to help get you up to speed much more quickly.

By reading the Getting Started Guide and studying the accompanying sample you'll learn best practices for :

• installing the dm Server
• setting up an effective development environment using the dm Server Eclipse tools
• creating web modules for presentation logic
• structuring your application with separate middle-tier and data access modules
• creating and managing shared services such as Data Sources
• creating unit and integration tests
• building dm Server applications using Maven

The guide is available in HTML and PDF formats, and the full code for the sample application can be found here…

Forrester recently described a trend that they refer to as "lean software" in their paper entitled Lean Software Is Agile, Fit-To-Purpose, And Efficient. They state that "lean software is emerging as the antidote to bloatware" and that "the trend toward lean software has been building for years, but the worldwide recession is accelerating it".

Forrester mentions SpringSource as one of four companies at the forefront of the lean software movement. This is due to our leadership within the Spring, Apache, Groovy and Grails communities, as well as our active encouragement, via SpringSource dm Server, of enterprise OSGi as the basis for next-generation application…

In an earlier post, I blogged about the REST capabilities we added to Spring @MVC version 3.0. Later, Alef wrote about using the introduced functionality to add an Atom view to the Pet Clinic application. In this post, I would like to introduce the client-side capabilities we added in Milestone 2.

RestTemplate

The RestTemplate is the central Spring class for client-side HTTP access. Conceptually, it is very similar to the JdbcTemplate, JmsTemplate, and the various other templates found in the Spring Framework and other portfolio projects. This means, for instance, that the RestTemplate is thread-safe once constructed, and that you can use callbacks to customize its operations.

RestTemplate Methods

The main entry points of the template are named after the six main HTTP methods:

HTTP	RestTemplate
DELETE	delete(String, String...)
GET	getForObject(String, Class, String...)
HEAD	headForHeaders(String, String...)
OPTIONS	optionsForAllow(String, String...)
POST	postForLocation(String, Object, String...)
PUT	put(String, Object, String...)

The names of these methods clearly indicate which HTTP method they invoke, while the second part of the name indicates what is returned. For instance, getForObject() will perform a GET, convert the HTTP response into an object type of your choice, and returns that object. postForLocation will do a POST, converting the given object into a HTTP request, and returns the response HTTP Location header where the newly created object can be…

In an earlier blog, Ben introduced Bundlor, the concepts behind it and how to use it from the command line as well as from within ANT and Maven. In this post I'll show how Bundlor can be used in an Eclipse environment.

When developing OSGi-based applications, some users don't want to spend time constantly updating their MANIFEST.MF, but instead want to focus on actual business logic in their application components: in such a scenario the Bundlor Eclipse integration will ensure that the MANIFEST.MF file reflects actual dependencies expressed by code artifacts in the project and removes the need to manually manage classpath settings in Eclipse. Additionally BundlorEclipse can help to cleanly separate runtime dependencies from test dependencies by introducing test-only…

It's the conference season. Despite the busy schedule, however, one conference stands alone for Spring content. SpringOne Europe is approaching fast. This year, it will be in Amsterdam, from April 27-29. Not only is Amsterdam a great destination in itself, the conference ends just before the Queen's Day holiday in the Netherlands: a fun cultural experience if you can spare an extra day.

SpringOne has always been a great conference, offering deep technical content and comprehensive coverage of Spring topics. We've been particularly busy over the last few months, so this year should be better…

As Rob's post points out, over the last few months we've learned quite a bit about how people want to manage their own OSGi applications.

We found that some developers want to manage their own bundle manifests, but need a bit of help to automate the details such as specifying package versions across a range of imports. Other developers want to have manifests generated based on the content of their project and the dependencies specified in their build files. In addition, both kinds of developers need to work with existing libraries that do not have the necessary OSGi metadata that enable them…

In the recent days and weeks, we've seen an increasing amount of interest in the future of build solutions for applications made up of OSGi bundles. Due to our heavy involvement with OSGi, this is something that is near and dear to our hearts and we've spent a long time looking at customer requirements and solutions for those requirements. In this blog entry, I will outline the requirements that we have identified and present the solutions that we see to these requirements.

I'm very interested in hearing from anyone who has extra requirements, thinks the requirements we have are bogus or has…

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that our EPL-licensed Spring IDE and dm Server Tools have been updated.

Both releases are mainly addressing bug fixes and minor improvements. Additionally the dm Server Tools got some new features like Bundle and PAR export as well as tailing of application trace files.

You can install both from our new consolidated Eclipse update site available from http://www.springsource.org/update/e3.4 (please note that this update site does not work with a web browser).

Cheers, Christian Dupuis Lead, Spring IDE & SpringSource Tool Suite

Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of the 2.0 version of our SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). You can find the press release here.

For the 2.0 iteration we focused on the two major feature areas that we identified based on the great feedback from our customer base and community: provide the best possible environment for Spring-based application development and provide tools to develop enterprise applications based on OSGi and the SpringSource dm Server.

I'd like to use this blog to introduce some of the new Spring development tools of STS 2.0. The new OSGi development tools have already been highlighted in an earlier blog…