Back in March 2010, VMware contributed the source of the SpringSource dm Server to Eclipse to become an Eclipse project. Today the 2.1 release of Eclipse Virgo, a light-weight application server for deploying applications based on OSGi, has had it's first official release as part of the Eclipse .

Virgo is a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a high degree of flexibility and reliability. It makes it possible to migrate existing enterprise Java applications to a light-weight modular architecture.  Key features in Virgo include

• an administration console to deploy and manage OSGi artifacts.
  
• a web server, based on Eclipse Gemini Web Container, that makes it easy to deploy existing WAR files, including all their dependencies.
  
• Support for existing third party frameworks, like Spring, Hibernate, Log4j, that may not be designed as OSGi bundles.

Virgo has proved popular with many companies, including SAP:

“Eclipse Virgo, with its modular OSGi foundation and its support for Enterprise Java Applications, will enable SAP to develop, deploy and maintain Java applications more easily, and thus serve our customers better,” said Bjoern Goerke, Senior Vice President and head of SAP NetWeaver® Development at SAP AG. “We are excited to join forces with the Virgo community and contribute to the success of the project with the goal to establish a healthy and vibrant Virgo ecosystem.”

 

The new release of Virgo 2.1 provides significant performance improvements, including a 5 times improvement on Windows start-up time, improved diagnostic tooling, integration with the Equinox console and better resource handling in the web container.

Rod Johnson states how here is happy with the community response to the Virgo project :

“We are very pleased with the response to Virgo from the Eclipse community,” said Rod Johnson, SVP and General Manager of VMware’s SpringSource product division.  “An important goal for starting this project was to create a larger community of users and contributors for the technology, therefore we are thrilled to have companies like SAP actively participate in the community.”

Virgo 2.1 is available now for download at http://www.eclipse.org/virgo.