GlassFish Awards Program

Ok, so we have to admit we didn't publish the name of the GAP top winner!

Yes, in fact, submissions from Jason Lee were so good that we could not consider them... and hired him instead! A long-time contributor to Mojarra and JSFTemplating (and other GlassFish-related efforts) Jason is based in Oklahoma City and now works as a Senior Java Developer on the GlassFish admin console.

Here is some of the GAP work done by Jason :
• Quercus on GlassFish vis the Update Center
• Mojarra Scales enhancements
• FileStreamerPhaseListener

Jason very elegantly sent us a heads up about him joining Sun which left room for other winners. Thank you Jason and welcome to Sun!

When we started GAP, he had to come up with a name and the easiest was to use GlassFish Awards Program. Looking back at all the applications received and the winners list, there is much more to GlassFish, than a great open source application server.

Overal, Hudson (Continuous Integration server) was the top performer (more on that in another post), but almost all other GlassFish sister projects were active in the contest. Here are a few examples :
• OpenESB: "rules4jbi" Service Engine for OpenESB.
• OpenPortal: SAW Implementation for jBPM jPDL.
• Shoal: Greenfire uses Shoal.
• Grizzly: Sébastien's Migration Guide: NIO real-time application to Grizzly (Sébastien also became a Grizzly commiter).
• SPNEGO: Greg Luck is the author and maintainer of this SPNEGO and Kerberos plugin for GlassFish.
• Jersey: Dynamic resource scanning at runtime for Jersey code contribution by Frank Martínez.

The GAP revealed how large the GlassFish community could spread beyond the core GlassFish AppServer friends & family group. As a matter of fact, this program is a good case of coopetition!

While we have many winning entries from end-users (hey, we're paying our customers! ;-), a fair number of system integrators, we also have winners from :

RedHat for a Hudson contribution (including a build-publisher plugin). JBoss is a big user of Hudson, see this story and their live instance.

WebTide (makers of the popular Jetty server) who made possible the use of the Jetty web container with the grizzly HTTP frontend used in GlassFish v3.

Oracle with multiple JSF/Mojarra bugs reported (and fixed since!).

Thank you to all of them, it's great to see how such a large and diverse community can work together on improving the tools and technologies we all use.

GlassFish bits are distributed in several different ways from Sun today: GlassFish, GlassFish Enterprise (formerly SJS AppServer), Java EE SDK, ... Coopetition has Oracle, JBoss, IBM and others also ship pieces of GlassFish as part of their offerings. The GAP rewarded alternate community distributions of GlassFish.

• IZpack from France's Julien Ponge. This installer for GlassFish v2 is quite popular with a fair number of downloads. Julien is working on a GlassFish v3 version.

• Linux Packages (RPMs and Gentoo) from Australia's Chris Ryan. This extends the reach of GlassFish to other new communities. Hopefully Chris will find the time to work on the Gentoo source version for v3. The RPM's Chris created are reportedly being used within his company Wotif.com.

These are great additions to the existing community work done to package GlassFish for and inside Ubuntu and Debian.

With less than 20% of the GAP submissions and winners from the US, I thought it would be nice to provide some data on the world-wide contributions. The GAP community is clearly Multi-Lingual. Doing a quick review of the list of winner, the split is as follows :
• 16 from North America
• 8 from India
• 7 from Australia
• 4 from latin America (Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador)
• 2 from South Africa
• 2 from Philippines
• 2 from China
• 1 from Japan
• 1 from Russia
• the rest from Europe (Hurray!)

Also of interest, several winners provided localizations of content for Hudson : German, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, French, and Russian. See also GeoMap and the recently updated map of GlassFish users.

Simplicity and extensibility is what makes Hudson tick. Combining extensibility and community shows great results in general and in particular in the case of the GlassFish Awards Program: Ullrich Hafner won the grand prize by providing the following three plugins: FindBugs, Task Scanner, and PMD. All three modules are listed and easily-installable from the default Hudson plugin manager and reported as widely used.

FindBugs: adds support for FindBugs, the popular open source program which uses static analysis to find Java bugs. The plug-in scans for findbugs.xml files in the build workspace and reports the number of warnings found.

Task Scanner: the plugin scans the workspace files for open tasks like TODO, FIXME, or @deprecated. It has configurable priority levels, trend report, etc...

PMD: The plug-in scans for pmd.xml files in the build workspace and reports the number of warnings found. It features trend reports, warnings report, colored HTML code output, failure threshold, and a configurable project health support.

All three plugins work with the freestyle and native m2 build option of Hudson.

By the way, the list of top winners for the Sun Community Awards is here.

As previously stated, the FishFarm Project won the GAP second prize. Author and maintainer of the project Michael Bien tells you more about what is really is: "FishFarm won second prize in GlassFish Community Innovation Awards Program".

His post explains the relationship with the GlassFish application serve and how it uses project shoal and the fork-join project. The project is really only starting, so now would be a good time to join the fun!

"Contributions" category
• 1 Grand prize ($20,000)
• Second and third prizes ($10,000 each)
• 20 base prizes ($4,000 each)
• 16 Honorable Mentions

"Bugs" category
• 161 bug report winners (some are multiple winners)

• 4 months work
• 260 emails on the submission email alias (most towards to deadline date!)
• many more email internally to set up and run the program!
• 195 people listed on the GeoMap

Total Winners: 102
Total money awarded: $175k.

#1- FindBugs Plugin Task Scanner Plugin PMD Plugin - Dr. Ullrich Hafner
These plugins support Hudson, a Duke-award winning project, and show that the GlassFish community is wider than just the GlassFish Server. These community-contributed plugins are very popular, part of the standard distribution and are used by many Hudson users. Ullrich is located in Switzerland.

#2- FishFarm - Michael Bien
FishFarm is an implementation of the fork-join Java framework (JSR166y). It enables distribution of computational tasks over the network using standard APIs. FishFarm used GlassFish's Project Shoal under the covers. Michael and his brother, Adam, have multiple GlassFish-related projects. Michael is located in Germany.

#3- Gentoo GlassFish ebuild & RPM Packaging for Glassfish V2 - Chris Ryan
Chris is a senior engineer at Wotif (one of the first large adopters of the GlassFish server) and has created GlassFish packages for inclusion in multiple GNU/Linux distributions, leveraging the value of Open Source licenses. Chris is located in Australia.

You can find all three winners on the Geo Map.

The GAP winners were nice enough to spend a few minutes filling out this wiki page to make the following geo-map possible :

Just click on "sparky" icons, zoom-in and out to see the winner details. The maps shows a great diversity of geographies for the winners with a fairly high concentration in Europe, but also India, Australia, Southa America, USA, South East Asia, and more. It's fun to see the faces of some well known GlassFish contributors for the first time :)

The Sun TechDays conference is going on strong in Sao Paolo with a reported 1000+ participants.
We took this opportunity to honor our two Brazilian GAP winners Claudio and Reginaldo. Here are the photos of the winners on stage:

Read more about it on Arun's blog, including what their contributions was.

The GlassFish Awards Program (GAP) has been closed for a little while and we can now announce the winners. While this press release has the formal condensed results of the program, this blog will go into more details in the next few days and weeks on the numerous (100+) winners (complete list).

Stay tuned for details on the various contributions, geographical distribution, and other tidbits.