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dm Kernel

Posted on October 19th, 2009 by Steve Powell in dm Server, OSGi, Spring.

Steve Powell

In Milestone M5, for the first time, dm Kernel is available standalone. You can get it from here.

What is dm Kernel?

Basically, dm Kernel is everything good about dm Server except support for web applications. So, there are no web apps supplied (not even Admin Console or Splash) and no Tomcat —just the kernel.

Essentially, dm Kernel provides you with all that is good about dm Server’s OSGi support, including:

  • scoping
  • hot deployment
  • pars
  • bundles
  • plans
  • configuration properties
  • auto-provisioning
  • repositories
    • all repository types: watched, external and remote
    • chain support (the chain is empty by default)
  • easy configurability
  • the user region
  • full system and application tracing and dump support
  • oh, and of course, Spring beans and Spring DM support as usual,

but no web stuff.

If you want OSGi modular support for your system apps, but don’t want or need to host web applications, then dm Kernel is what you want.

This is exactly the same kernel that is shipped with a full dm Server—no modifications or adaptations. Being able to deploy and run the kernel by itself is yet another demonstration of the clean, modular design of dm Server.

Small print

How do I administer a dm Kernel without the Admin Console? (I can almost hear you ask.) Well, the answer is also provided in M5—use the Shell either locally or remotely (over ssh). You’d think we planned this, or something.

Enjoy.

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4 responses

  1. Fred says:

    Added on October 19th, 2009 at 5:56 am

    Hello,

    This is all great news.

    Do you have any plan to release a DM Kernel augmented with JEE services ?

    I would definitely buy a Spring DM Server providing out of the box standard JEE services like JTA, JMS and DataSource.

    You would have standard bundles hiding their implementation and exposing standard interfaces like

    javax.sql.DataSource
    javax.transaction.TransactionManager
    javax.jms.ConnectionFactory

    JBoss is working on it:
    http://jbossosgi.blogspot.com/2009/06/jboss-osgi-runtime-as-integration.html

    Is it in SpringSource's scope ?

  2. Guo Du says:

    Added on October 19th, 2009 at 6:03 am

    I noticed the dm kernel released with "SpringSource Application Platform License". What's the license compatibility with Apache 2 and GPL?

  3. Ben Hale (blog author) says:

    Added on October 19th, 2009 at 2:00 pm

    @Fred,

    dm Kernel will always be the leanest distribution we make so no it will probably never have the JEE services you speak of. However, dm Server, which is basically a dm Kernel distribution with added content (web bundle support, web admin console, etc) could package those types.

  4. Fred says:

    Added on October 19th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    @Ben Hale

    It would be priceless to have a packaged "JEE DM Server" out of the box, because assembling together those JEE services thru OSGi, with proper librairies versioning and correct implementations is…well… a hassle :)

    I did a prototype for JMS/DataSource/JTA a while ago using Spring DM/Equinox:
    http://code.google.com/p/financial-platform/

    It works but assembling everything and maintaining a coherency over the time is not so easy.

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