Christopher Frost

New Web Admin Console In Virgo

Virgo 3.6.0.M01 has been released and it contains a new web admin console. While visually it appears very similar to the existing web console it has some new features and under the covers a lot has changed.

New Features

The OSGi explorer has been replaced with a graphical view that shows both the service and dependency relationships between bundles. Clicking on the relationships or the bundles brings up more detailed information. Double clicking lets you navigate round the bundles and explore their relationships.

The Configuration view is now more detailed showing the configuration present in each Region.

There’s a new view that shows the repositories configured in Virgo and lets you deploy Artefacts directly from those repositories.

Under the Hood

The Web Admin console now has very few dependencies and can run on either the OSGi HTTPService or as a Web Application Bundle without any changes. It will detect its environment and only deploy itself on a HTTPService if there is no Web Application Container available. It is heavily AJAX based and uses a combination of Gemini Management and Jolokia (a library that converts MBeans to JSON end points) to both read and modify the OSGi framework. The only bundles required in addition are the Equinox Regions implementation, two utility bundles from Apache to handle file uploads and, of course, OSGi itself.

The best things about these changes is that the Web Admin Console now comes packaged with the Virgo Kernel meaning you get web based admin without needing the full Tomcat or Jetty based packagings of Virgo.

The Web Admin Console will continue to be developed with more improvements planned.