London, UK, 16th September, 2009 – Paremus, today announced the acceptance and migration of the Sigil open source OSGi™ development tooling project to Apache Felix. Sigil provides the first OSGi application development tooling that unifies the IDE and server side development lifecycle, simplifying and ensuring consistency through the development, test and release process. The tool is currently available as an Eclipse IDE plugin and Apache Ant/Ivy plugin as a subproject of Apache Felix.
"Paremus invested in building the Sigil OSGi development tooling project to simplify the development, dependency management, testing, release and operational processes associated with successfully realizing the full potential of componentization and re-use using OSGi technology,” commented Richard Nicholson, Founder and CEO of Paremus. "Sigil provides sophisticated bundle dependency management tools and access to external bundle repositories through a pluggable API."
"Sigil is the result of our own and customer experiences of developing OSGi-based applications,” said David Savage, Sigil project co-lead. “We are using Sigil to develop and build our distributed runtime product, the Paremus Service Fabric, and wanted to make its unique capabilities available to the wider OSGi community. We will continue to enhance the capabilities and look forward to input, feedback and contributions from the Apache community to extend Sigil’s capabilities. Specific areas we’ll be working on in the Apache forum in the near future include runtime support for testing OSGi applications in the Eclipse IDE environment. We will also be looking to grow support for other IDE’s (Netbeans & IntelliJ) and other build frameworks including Maven 3, along with enhancing the features and functionality.”
Sigil uses OSGi metadata to calculate project dependencies dynamically at build time, using the same metadata that is used by OSGi at runtime. This allows Sigil to wire together existing bundles in the file system or from an OSGi Bundle Repository (OBR) to resolve completion dependencies.
With headless build support as well as integrated Eclipse support, Sigil uses the same simple properties file to define bundles in the IDE and stand-alone. This ensures that bundles created by either the IDE or headless builds are identical. The Sigil headless build supports Apache Ivy with seamless integration into existing Ivy builds, and automatic injection of Ivy dependences by resolving the Import-Package metadata.
"We are pleased to welcome Sigil as a subproject of Apache Felix. This provides an exciting tool to build upon for developers within our ever growing ecosystem of OSGi capabilities," commented Richard Hall, Chair of the Apache Felix project.
The source for Sigil is available immediately. Instructions for building and testing it can be found at http://felix.apache.org/site/apache-felix-sigil.html. Anyone interested in getting involved with the project should contact the Apache Felix user mailing list at users@felix.apache.org. |
