The future of Java technology in the enterprise rests with its rapidly evolving ability to regain its original promise of lightweight, flexible and dynamic application development and deployment. In other words, the faster Java gets to the stackless stack, the brighter its future will be. As James Governor said in his seminal article, “component-based development is a common idea, but component-based production is a whole different ballgame.” That has been the vision of the EclipseRT project since its inception: the ability to support deployed runtimes which use only those components actually required by the applications at hand. This is an inherently service-based approach, and one which has seen rapid adoption by enterprise Java and Enterprise Service Bus vendors.
SpringSource has long been one of the most visible and vocal leaders of lightweight, componentized Java runtimes. Today, they bring that leadership to Eclipse. The Virgo project proposal brings to EclipseRT project a key component (no pun intended) required to provide a complete offering of OSGi-based runtimes from the Eclipse Foundation: a complete module-based Java application server designed to run enterprise Java applications. Based on SpringSource’s dm Server, we believe this project will increase the momentum of the enterprise Java developer community under the Eclipse umbrella.
The past couple of years, “establish Eclipse runtime technology as the leading open source runtime platform” has been on the top of the list of the strategic goals of the Eclipse Foundation. The recently announced Gemini project — and now Virgo — go a long way towards realizing that vision.
You can read more about Virgo on Adrian Colyer’s blog post.
[Revised to fix broken link to Adrian’s post.]
