Eclipse Dirigible™ is a High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service (hpaPaaS) designed for rapid business application development, incorporating Low Code/No Code methodologies. It targets both end-user developers, offering an in-browser IDE that requires no local installation, and service providers seeking a self-contained, deployable application server bundle for environments like Kubernetes. Dirigible aims to significantly boost developer productivity and application delivery speed.

How It Works

Dirigible operates as a full-stack application server running directly within the browser for developers, eliminating setup friction. For deployment, it provides a self-contained software bundle deployable on VMs or containerized environments. It supports a wide array of RDBMS and NoSQL databases, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Snowflake. A key architectural choice is the "In-System Programming" model, enabling dynamic, live alterations to running applications, coupled with a rich set of integrated engines like ActiveMQ, Quartz, and GraalJS for comprehensive business application functionality.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Primary Install/Run: Download precompiled binaries from http://download.dirigible.io/ to skip the build process. Alternatively, build from source using Maven (mvn clean install) or deploy via Docker (docker pull dirigiblelabs/dirigible:latest). Native images can be built using GraalVM.
• Prerequisites: Java JDK 21+, Maven 3.8.x, esbuild, tsc, and ttyd (for integration tests). Docker is required for containerized deployments. GraalVM is needed for native image compilation.
• Links: Instant Trial: https://trial.dirigible.io, Community Slack: https://slack.dirigible.io, Project Home: https://www.dirigible.io.

Highlighted Details

• "In-System Programming" model for dynamic live system alterations.
• Integrated engines: ActiveMQ, Quartz, Lucene, Flowable, GraalJS, etc.
• Broad database support: RDBMS (PostgreSQL, HANA, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Snowflake).
• Content Management System (CMS) integration with AWS S3.
• Simplified workflow via Claude Code commands.

Maintenance & Community

The project is maintained by Eclipse Dirigible contributors. Community engagement is facilitated through a Slack workspace (https://slack.dirigible.io) and a developer mailing list (https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/dirigible-dev). Issue tracking is available on GitHub.

Licensing & Compatibility

Eclipse Dirigible is licensed under the Eclipse Public License v 2.0 (EPL 2.0). This is a permissive license suitable for commercial use, though it requires derivative works to also be licensed under EPL 2.0 if distributed.

Limitations & Caveats

Performance issues have been noted on Windows when mounting Docker volumes; using dedicated Docker volumes is recommended. Integration tests require ttyd and can be time-consuming. Windows users may need to run Maven commands with administrator privileges to avoid test failures.