Essentially Virgo is the culmination of 3 years of work in developing an application server based entirely on OSGi and exposing OSGi for use by applications. Virgo started inside SpringSource as the dm Server project which was licensed under the GNU Public License and shipped two major versions. About a year ago we started donating the codebase to Eclipse as the Virgo project licensed under the much more liberal Eclipse Public License. The transfer of the runtime code to Eclipse is now complete, we have satisfied the rather stringent IP checks required of all Eclipse projects, and Virgo is nearing its first formal release by the end of October.

Any Java developer, especially one who works with open-source software, will tell you that being the build monkey is a thankless job. You spend all of your time digging through Ant XML files and pulling down the proper classes and methods from constantly updated libraries and packages around the Internet and your internal repositories. Isn't there anything that can save Java from the endless complexity of dependencies?

After releasing his latest book covering OSGi & Equinox, I took the opportunity to catch up with Jeff McAffer. In this interview we discuss the basics of OSGi, the Equinox implementation, benefits of modularity and some best practices around using Equinox.

OSGi, which is intended to provide modularity for Java, is the focus of efforts afoot at IBM and the Eclipse Foundation, with IBM leveraging OSGi in its application server and Eclipse using it in a new framework for accessing enterprise technology.

With an upcoming feature pack for WebSphere Application Server (WAS) v7, IBM seeks to make it easier to use OSGi.

Siemens Enterprise Communications have been developing telephony switches for the past 100 years, moving to software focussed solutions in the last decade. To bring their technology offerings up to date, Eclipse Equinox was chosen to give them a solid foundation for their OpenScape Unified Communications suite.