mercredi février 06, 2008 
mercredi février 06, 2008 Woodstock from the GlassFish Update Center
Woodstock is a GlassFish sub-project providing a set of nice JSF components used throughout Sun web admin consoles (like the GlassFish Web Console). It's easily available from the NetBeans JSF palette. Some components are AJAX-enabled and all components are theme-able.
To get a feel for what's available from your local GlassFish v2 install, simply go to the update center (GLASSFISH_HOME/updatecenter/bin/updatetool) and install Woodstock 4.1. This will place a sample web application available from the "/example" web context in domain1. Most likely from http://localhost:8080/example/start.jsp
Here are a few components :
mardi novembre 13, 2007 Update Center interview on the GlassFish Podcast is out
I've previously discussed various aspects of the GlassFish Update Center.
You can now listen to the project lead in this new GlassFish podcast interview.
lundi octobre 22, 2007
Using the GlassFish Update Center to reach out to thousands of developers
The GlassFish Update Center is a tool that lets you deploy extra features, libraries, or even applications to an existing installation in a very user-friendly fashion. It is part of every copy of GlassFish, Sun Java System Application Server and the Java EE 5 SDK (3.5M+ downloads). The following describes the simplest GlassFish Update Center module who's only job is to deploy a self-contained web application (no database dependency in particular).
To follow-up on a previous post, I'll use XWiki which has since hit version 1.0 with 1.1.1 being the latest. I've tweaked their WAR distribution to use HSQL (as already described in the previous post) so that it has no dependency on external resources. Making this XWiki distribution available via the GlassFish Update Center requires 2 easy steps:
1/ Package the WAR artifact into a module file (default extension is .nbm but anything can be used as it is really only a ZIP file) with info/info.xml and module/xwiki.war as the only two entries. I've actually called the file xwiki.gfz for no particular reason and posted it here.
2/ Author an Update Center catalog file compliant with this DTD describing the module - download size, module author, license, short/long description, etc... This XML file is the only server-side component needed. I've created and posted the file here (so you can try it). The key line here is :
Module-Type="APPLICATION"
which basically tells the update center that the module is a Java EE artifact (WAR, EAR, RAR) which will cause the updater to copy it to GlassFish's autodeploy directory. Other valid values for Module-Type are ADDON_INSTALLER, ADDON_CONFIGURATOR, and ARCHIVE.
The user experience then looks like this :
• Start the Update Center client located in GLASSFISH_INSTALL/updatecenter/bin.
• Add an Update Center definition in the "Preferences" tab using this URL - http://blogs.sun.com/alexismp/resource/xwiki-gfuc.xml
• Install the update after agreeing to the license (download, unpack and install all happens under the cover)
• Launch the application (no restart)
Steps are illustrated on this other page
This is an easy way for the many web applications out there to be easily made available to the large number of people downloading GlassFish. Of course not every application is self-contained like the one I used and in that case you would have to use a custom installer and configurator as explained by Manveen here and here. It allows for the Update Center to install bits (libraries, config files, ...), modify existing file (i.e. domain.xml) and create the appropriate resources in the application server (connection pools for instance).
Interested in packaging your application for the GlassFish Update Center? Try this out and post comments here!
( oct. 22 2007, 11:02:00 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [3]
mercredi septembre 19, 2007 GlassFish Update Center - what's available (Jersey, Roller, JRubyOnRails, Phobos)
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While it only had a few updates to GlassFish and additional documentation for a while, with the release of GlassFish v2, we're starting to see a whole set of additional features available through this delivery mechanism:
Make sure you also check out how to setup your own update center and write your own updates. |
jeudi avril 19, 2007 Nimbus for the GlassFish Update Center?
There's a lot happening in both the server and the clients Java camps. Of course JSR 295 and 296 are the most exciting, but in the community space, I find the work on the Nimbus Look-and-Feel (which I am kinda already using every day since it's based on the Solaris Gnome theme) sounds very exciting.
Of course I could use this new Nimbus look and feel and apply it to NetBeans (the -ui option makes that trivial and I'm still not sure why this is not a standard JVM/Swing option just yet), but I'll let Roman and friends do that. It's probably not yet well known, but GF now has an Update Center as part of v2. It's a separate application from the admin UI and it is Swing-based. Here's what it looks like:
Unfortunately, after some hacking do change the look and feel, the first very good impression I initially got from using SwingSet with Nimbus didn't translate to GlassFish's update center:
I'll keep looking...
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at javax.swing.JTable.setSelectionBackground(JTable.java:2454)
at javax.swing.plaf.synth.SynthTableUI.updateStyle(SynthTableUI.java:117)
at javax.swing.plaf.synth.SynthTableUI.installDefaults(SynthTableUI.java:95)
at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicTableUI.installUI(BasicTableUI.java:1354)
at javax.swing.JComponent.setUI(JComponent.java:668)
at javax.swing.JTable.setUI(JTable.java:3526)
at javax.swing.JTable.updateUI(JTable.java:3582)
at javax.swing.JTable.
In the mean time, the GlassFish Update Center is a tool for making documentation, product updates, extensions and even partner software available to the entire GlassFish user community. This is only the beginning.
( avr. 19 2007, 02:04:00 AM CEST ) Permalink
