Java Enterprise System 6 now available !!
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I'm pleased to announce that Java Enterprise System 6 has been shipped last April 27. In summary, Java ES remains a comprehensive set of subscription-based suites combining SUN software, support, professional services, and educational services.
Java
Enterprise System 6 provides the same benefits as Java Enterprise System 5, but
with
the additional coordination / testing of Identity Management Suite and Java CAPS. Several new components are also available as part of
Java Enterprise System 6, such as:
- Sun GlassFish Web Space Server v10
- Sun OpenSSO Enterprise
For more details about Java Enterprise System 6 and its content, Paul Hinz wrote an excellent article in his blog. Worth reading!
Coming back to my preferred topic, namely testing, that's also a big achievement for my team. We have been leading Java Enterprise System 6 testing since a couple of months, with the following goals in mind:
- Detect Interoperability issues as soon as possible in the development cycles of the Java Enterprise System components, so that they can be fixed before products ship
- Ensure that most standard customer-based configurations, involving multiple Java Enterprise System components deployed on multiple nodes, are functional
- Make sure that Java Enterprise System remains functional on the most common virtualization technologies (Solaris Zones, Logical Domains, VMware images, ...)
To accomplish those goals, we took a new approach structured in 2 layers:
- Pre-integration
testing layer: before starting official Java ES R6 cycles,
integration tests combining multiple products still under development
have been planned on simple configurations (generally single nodes), in
order to detect regressions in advance and let time for each
Engineering product team to fix those issues. The key concept has been to reuse automated functional test suites coming from component Quality teams and exercise them in different environments. As key benefits,
- it has leveraged quality coverage from a Java ES standpoint,
- it has complemented component Quality team deliverables,
- it has provided results immediately understandable by component Quality teams
- System-level interoperability layer: throughout official Java ES R6 cycles, a set of customer-based deployments, also known as Java ES Reference Architectures (See Rasta's blog for more details) have been exercised. Typical reference architectures are relying on multiple system nodes on which Java ES base and/or various components from the Java ES Suites are deployed. On top of that, 2 types of real-life scenarios have been executed:
- Fresh install scenarios, consisting of deploying the reference architecture from scratch, on Solaris, Linux, ...
- Deployment upgrade scenarios, starting to deploy the reference architecture from a
Java ES R4 or R5 baseline and then migrating to Java ES R6 with intermediate checkpoints
I will come back later in my blog on those 2 layers and what benefits it brought to the Java ES program but I can already say we're continuing in the same mode to prepare the future Java ES versions. Meanwhile, let's celebrate this Java ES R6 release, worth trying for sure!