Thursday December 10, 2009

Today we are releasing GlassFish v3 (community) and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 (commercial), following the release of Java EE 6 a few days ago.   Java EE is 10 years old - nearly to the day. GlassFish v3 - the project - is 4.5 years old (although the code base for GlassFish v3 is much older).

We've come a long way with GlassFish v3, and there are quite a few "firsts" in this release (correct me if I'm over zealous - I'm living on caffeine right now):

• First Java EE 6 compatible community and commercial implementation
• First Java EE 6 Web Profile compatible community and commercial implementation
• First Java EE application server to start in seconds.
• First GlassFish distribution under 30MB (GlassFish v3 Web Profile)
  
• First time we managed requirements in the community
• First time we realized a wiki is less than ideal for requirements management
• First GlassFish release to document a public release schedule, milestones & all
• First time we had to update the schedule in the wiki (due to Java EE 6 release change) :-)
  
• First application server that exposes a RESTful management & monitoring API
• First application server to let end users easily swap OSGi implementations
  
• First application server to establish a community strictly around quality testing (survey metrics).   I simply cannot give this community enough kudos.  The breadth of test deployments really helped improve GlassFish v3 quality.
  
• First application server to host dynamic language containers, such as JRuby and Jython. Web Archive packaging and servlet container not required. JRuby gem available.
• First application server with a DTrace probe (ok, a bit aggressive since it will be in beta form due to JDK 7 dependency). Learn more (here) (here).
  

Wednesday August 26, 2009

Today, Harpreet and I delivered a webinar on "What's new with Java EE 6", and also covered a bit about GlassFish v3 as the reference implementation.  Wow, what a turnout.  In fact, the turnout was so large that we ran into some unfortunate issues that we'll definitely learn from.

First, we needed more panel members to answer Q&A (chat window), which was coming faster than we could answer.  In fact, I had problems with the highlighted question constantly losing focus, so I ended up answering the wrong chat question a couple of times. Apologies to attendees for not getting to more questions. 

Second, WebEx barfed on me when trying to share my desktop to thousands of attendees while trying to run a demo on writing a Java EE 6 version of the obligatory "Hello World" app with Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1.  The good news is that I whipped up a quick screencast of how to do this. Bear in mind it was done rather quickly, and if I had my druthers, I'd try to get it down a bit better.   However, you know people want to see a demo ASAP when they use the CAPS LOCK to say "CAN WE SEE THE DEMO?"   Without furthur ado, here goes the youtube (HD version here):

Monday August 17, 2009

It's official! GlassFish Tools Bundle For Eclipse 1.1 has been released and the bits are posted. Some highlighted features include:

• OpenSolaris x86 support (Yeah!)
• Eclipse IDE updated to 3.4.2
• Pre-registered MySQL JDBC driver
• SailFin v2 server target (download separately)
  
• Added Maven Plugins
• JAX-WS and JAX-RS runtime and Wizards added
• Reduced download size due to Pack200 compression (~240MB, 160MB on Mac)

Note that Developer Expert Assistance is available.

Thursday July 23, 2009

Yesterday we delivered a webinar on setting up load balancing for GlassFish clusters: Make Applications Highly Available: Load Balancing GlassFish Clusters. I'll post a link to the replay when available.  The registration and attendance numbers were  pretty amazing, which tells me a couple of things:

1. The community is either already using GlassFish Enterprise Server in production, or are considering to place it in production.
2. The community would like to learn more about approaches to load balancing GlassFish deployments.
   

While GlassFish supports multiple load balancing approaches (hardware load balancers, mod_jk, and the GlassFish. We have been adding both marketing and engineering content in this area due to the amount of interest we are seeing (example).

One of the more interesting features of the GlassFish is the ability to automatically push out the load balancer configuration from the GlassFish Domain Administraton Console (DAS) to the GlassFish Load Balancer Plugin running in one or more remote web servers. Vivek demonstrated this feature during the webinar.  Because of time, we did not have to to demonstrate cluster setup/configuration or how to set up the secure communication channel between the plugin and the DAS.

First, you can set up a GlassFish high availability cluster, from download to validating the configuration, in under 10 minutes.  Of course, it takes a bit longer if you want to install a cluster across multiple hosts, but that's just boilerplate (s)ftp and time consuming.

To address the second point, setting up a secure communication channel, I thought I would double-click on that a bit and show you how to set it up. Again, this will be done on a single host, removing the boilerplate of FTPing the installer around.  The first step is to download the GlassFish Enterprise Server bits that include HADB (download url). This bundle also includes the load balancer plugin. Download the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1 with HADB. I used the file-based installer during the demo instead of the package-based installer.

Side note - apologies for the webinar demo demons hitting the load balancer installation demo. For some reason the network was slow (GUI was updating too slowly), and the terminal was not refreshing properly, so I lost context of what screen I was on. Yes, I ran through the demo beforehand in the exact same way it was demo'd, 4 times without issues. Sigh.

Below is a script that will set up the secure connection between the DAS and the Sun Web Server to enable automated updates of the load balancer configuration. I've added documentation for each step.

#!/usr/bin/bash

#################################################################
# This script will set up the secure communication channel between
# the Sun Web Server and DAS for automated load balancer updates. It
# assumes that both the web server and DAS exist on the same
# box (hey, it's a DEMO ;-) )
#################################################################

#
# Top-level "HOME_DIRECTORY" variables. Examples are shown,
# replace variables with data that reflect your environment.
# Error checking of commands not shown :-/. Also note that
# in my demo, I put all bits under /var/tmp/demo directory.
#

WS_HOME=/var/tmp/demo/webserver7
JAVA_HOME=/usr/jdk/latest
DAS_DOMAIN=/var/tmp/demo/glassfish/domains/domain1

#
# Variables related to the web server configuration
#

WS_INSTANCE=https-my_webserver_instance.sun.com
SECURE_DAS_COMM_PORT=4443
LISTENER_NAME=http-listener-2

#
# Variables related to certificates. Because this is a demo, we will
# create a self-signed certificate.
#

CERT_NAME=ServerCert
CERT_ALIAS=s1as
CERT_EXPORT_FILE=/var/tmp/demo/etc/${CERT_ALIAS}.rfc

#
# Push any existing webserver configuration modifications, in case
# the load balancer was just installed in the webserver, for example
#

${WS_HOME}/bin/wadm \
        deploy-config \
        --user=admin \
        --force ${WS_INSTANCE}

#
# Create a new HTTP listener to communicate with the GlassFish Domain
# Administration Server. This is the connection where the loadbalancer
# configuration changes will be pushed.
#

${WS_HOME}/bin/wadm \
        create-http-listener \
        --user=admin \
        --server-name=${WS_INSTANCE} \
        --default-virtual-server-name=${WS_INSTANCE} \
        --listener-port=${SECURE_DAS_COMM_PORT} \
        --config=${WS_INSTANCE} ${LISTENER_NAME}

#
# Create a self-signed certificate for demo or educational purposes. Typically
# a signed certificate will be installed for maximum security in production
#

${WS_HOME}/bin/wadm \
        create-selfsigned-cert \
        --user=admin \
        --nickname=${CERT_NAME} \
        --server-name=${WS_INSTANCE} \
        --token=internal \
        --config=${WS_INSTANCE}

#
# Set SSL property on the http listener used for DAS communication, using
# the certificate just defined
#
 
${WS_HOME}/bin/wadm \
        set-ssl-prop \
        --user=admin \
        --http-listener=${LISTENER_NAME} \
        --config=${WS_INSTANCE} \
        enabled=true \
        server-cert-nickname=${CERT_NAME}

#
# Export the DAS public key certificate stored in the Java keystore. Note that
# the Enterprise Profile (default for GlassFish w/HADB bundle) utilizes the
# NSS keystore, so this would be replaced with the equivalent certutil command.
#

${JAVA_HOME}/bin/keytool \
        -export \
        -rfc \
        -alias ${CERT_ALIAS} \
        -keystore ${DAS_DOMAIN}/config/keystore.jks \
        -file ${CERT_EXPORT_FILE}

#
# Import the DAS public key certificate into the the certificate database,
# enabling a secure, trusted communication channel between the DAS and
# the web server.
#

${WS_HOME}/bin/certutil \
        -A \
        -a \
        -n ${CERT_ALIAS} \
        -t "TC" \
        -i ${CERT_EXPORT_FILE} \
        -d  ${WS_HOME}/admin-server/config-store/${WS_INSTANCE}/config/ 

#
# List the certificates in the web server certificate database
#

${WS_HOME}/bin/certutil \
        -L \
        -d ${WS_HOME}/admin-server/config-store/${WS_INSTANCE}/config 

#
# Push webserver configuration modifications to the instance
#

${WS_HOME}/bin/wadm \
        deploy-config \
        --user=admin \
        --force ${WS_INSTANCE}

Wednesday June 03, 2009

We have been using multiple metrics, such as downloads and registrations, to measure GlassFish adoption, all of which you can check out at The Aquarium.  For example, GlassFish has been the most downloaded application server for quite some time, and is a leading indicator of what can happen further down the road.

Down that road, another metric is to measure the adoption of an open source project by other open source projects.  Because "open source" projects have source code publicly available, it is possible to automate the gathering of data/metadata for open source projects, which offers non-subjective evidence of adoption.  Ohloh (recently acquired by SourceForge) has been doing just that, by crawling 38,000 projects across 3,500 source forges. With the support of Ohloh, we have been able to measure the adoption of GlassFish within open source communities.

The results are in with this report, and GlassFish adoption has shown continued within open source communities.  In fact, the first graph shows that GlassFish is now the most targeted application server among open source projects, with over 50% of those projects supporting GlassFish.  The second graph (below) shows that new projects target GlassFish a stunning 73% of the time, far surpassing any other application server. Note that in both cases, projects can support more than one application server, hence the results total more than 100%.

The results of GlassFish adoption is apparent when you consider the growth in monetization of GlassFish. While Sun does not break out GlassFish Enterprise Server in our earnings reports, GlassFish is contributing to the growth of software infrastructure at Sun, and is a leading indicator that shows that the future opportunity looks bright for GlassFish Enterprise Server. 

Tuesday March 24, 2009

For me, it's Ground Zero for EclipseCon, 2009.  I wanted to get an early start to post about the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse, but it looks like Ludo beat me to the punch.  I was slowed down a bit by the fact that I forgot to pack toothpaste, which does not exactly mash well with booth duty. No worries, the hotel lobby personnel had my back, so my breath is minty fresh :-)

Sooooo, Sun is announcing the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse, which bundles community editions of GlassFish v2.1 and GlassFish v3 Prelude, Eclipse 3.4 (with Web Tools Platform), GlassFish Eclipse plugin and optionally JDK 1.6.  In addition, we've included the Java EE Javadocs, so you get Java EE API auto-completion.

Here are some notes about the bundle I think are worthwhile to mention:

• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse v0.9.9 is not quite FCS yet. Great quality, but we have a few motions to go through for a 1.0 release.  We're doing everything we can to get to 1.0 as quickly as possible.
  
  
• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse is *extending* the reach of GlassFish into the Eclipse community. In the past, developers had to pull together too many pieces (above) to get an Eclipse-based GlassFish environment.
  
  
• To preempt the tinfoil hats, GlassFish will continue to ship with the award winning NetBeans IDE. In fact, check out this video Adam Bien's presentation at Community One East on the NetBeans 6.7 with GlassFish v3 Prelude. 3 slides and a ton of code.
  
  
• If you are interested in using GlassFish with Eclipse, the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse is the quickest way to get there.  Eclipse is pre-configured (err, pre-integrated) with GlassFish, including log file viewing, http monitor, and more.
  
  
• With GlassFish v3 Prelude, Eclipse developers don't lose HTTP session state when their application is re-deployed. Developer lifecycle simplified to edit-save-refresh browser. Keeps your mind on the problem, not the tool!
  
  
• With GlassFish v3 Prelude, developers get an early look at Java EE 6 APIs, including JSF 2.0 Early Access and EJB 3.1 Lite Early Access (both in the Update Center).  JAX-RS is final and fully supported (also in Update Center).
  
  
• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. No worries, OpenSolaris is coming.
  

Tuesday March 17, 2009

I do like to see bloggers post a pic of themselves on their blog. Just in case I run into one of 'em at a trade show.  However, I've always been bugged at personal portrait pictures on blogs, articles, etc that are waaayy out-of-date. I swear that PR folks never updated the Scott McNealy pic during his tenure as CEO. To each his own, I suppose.

The pic I had on my blog was about 6 years old, which made me a target of my own criticism. I kinda liked that pic, though. Fresh hair cut. 165lbs. 36 yrs young.  No signs of bald spot.

Today I decided to update the pic. What a difference 6 years makes!  42 years old. Less hair to cut (barring nose/ears). 20lbs heavier. A newly forming bald spot is racing my receding hairline to the top of my head (my money's on the bald spot). I'd swear my nose is 2mm (.005%) longer. I could go on. And on. And on.  However, it's me. Uncut and raw. The real deal. Dagnabit, I'm diggin' it.

I've been thinking about updating the pic for a while, when I finally saw one that made the grade.  A bit too "visionary-looking" for my taste, but the alternatives weren't as promising - such as me in Las Vegas with a ... (never mind) or at the beach without a shirt (Vegas pic is way better).

Stay tuned for 2015.

Tuesday February 10, 2009

Busy, busy day. Lots of news regarding Sun GlassFish Portfolio in general, and  Enterprise Manager in particular. I will in no way try to keep up with Nazrul on Enterprise Manager blogging :-)

I have spoken with countless customers about GlassFish Enterprise Server over the last 18 months (such as T-Mobile and TravelMuse), and it's no surprise common threads appear, such as cost reduction, avoiding vendor lock-in, and support for the latest standards (sooner). The concerns customers have with products based on open source center primarily around support and the ability to troubleshoot production issues.

Regarding support, GlassFish Enterprise Server subscribers have access to 24x7 support with live call transfer for high priority ("production down") issues. In addition, Platinum support offers a Customer Advocate who understands customer deployments, resulting in faster problem resolution and escalation management. However, a Customer Advocate also acts in a proactive manner via regular meetings to keep up with customer environments and issues, and can work with customers on practices to avoid downtime.

To address concerns with visibility into production deployments from a product perspective, Sun is  introducing Enterprise Manager with GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1 (and GlassFish Portfolio). I'll reiterate Nazrul's coverage of Enterprise Manager, which is a good one-stop shop that covers the improved manageability and observability features.  Of particular importance is the ability to avoid downtime in the first place with various alerts and log file management.  We expect many enterprise customers will have enterprise management tools in place. For these customers, SNMP monitoring support is key. A really helpful feature that is generally JDBC pool management.  JDBC pool management is essentially "auto pilot" for JDBC connection pool optimization. Turn it on and, odds are, you will get better performance with less overhead.

If you get a chance, check out Nazrul's Enterprise Manager post and feel free to give us feedback. We look forward to it!

In case you haven't viewed the Q2FY09 quarterly earnings announcement, both MySQL/Infrastructure software and Niagara-based servers are growing strong. Sun doesn't break down the numbers to specific products, but the revenue shows that a growing number of customers are coming to Sun as they build out their web infrastructure.

As for GlassFish, I go home each day with a smile on my face knowing that GlassFish Enterprise Server is contributing to that growth with many new customers.  Calendar year 2008 delivered roughly 9 million downloads, and over 300,000 registrations. Registration is optional, so we do our best to earn it. Feel free to use the GeoMap to view the growth. While I am continually and pleasantly surprised by these numbers, I can't help but feel we are only getting warmed up as our virtual team - both Sun and non-Sun - continues to grow.

All this being said, we are not resting on our laurels. Nope. Too much on our plate in order to continue earning new customers. We're listening.  What do you like about GlassFish/Sun/community? How can we improve GlassFish/Sun/community?  Feel free to contact me directly, or use the GlassFish user's email alias to provide feedback. Other routes to feedback include the The Aquarium blog, FishCAT (GlassFish Quality community), GlassFish.TV,  Twitter, and the plethora of GlassFish community bloggers (too many to list).

Tuesday January 13, 2009

Two recent high availability mediacasts, the GlassFish Clustering screencast and the recent GlassFish High Availability webinar (and companion whitepaper), have done well (IMHO).   To quickly summarize, the screencast covered download, setup, and validation of a GlassFish cluster. The webinar covered architectural approaches to deploying GlassFish clusters in a virtualized environment.

The screencast hit > 1,500 views in total (YouTube + Sun Learning Exchange). Time well spent on my part, I think. Hopefully it was time well spent on the viewers part as well.

As for the webinar, over 1,000 registered to attend the webinar, hundreds attended, and hundreds are viewing the replay. Lots of questions occurred during the chat, and some business relationships were formed in the process.

Me-thinks we've addressed a bit of pent-up demand on GlassFish High Availability.

Wednesday December 24, 2008

Sssooo many things have happened with GlassFish in 2008, I was a bit hesitant to write this blog in fear of missing something.  Then again, I'm not known for being a shy blogger. These are not in an order of importance or priority, just rolling off the top of my head in my "brevity is not an option" blogging style.

1. Adoption. GlassFish adoption is through the roof. Were still counting, but somewhere near 9 million downloads and 300,000 product registrations. Exceeded my expectations. That's more than one download for every Java developer!? Me-thinks that developers are trying to stay current with latest versions.  Feel free to track GlassFish adoption using the GeoMap or on The Aquarium.
   
   
2. JRuby on GlassFish. Quite popular thanks to the work by Jacob, Arun, Vivek, Charles, Thomas, and others. No doubt this is contributing to GlassFish adoption. GlassFish in the twittesphere and the blogosphere quite active.
   
   
3. Customers.  Quite a bit of commercial interest in open source in general and GlassFish in particular.  Customers like the innovation and transparency, not to mention the flexibility of "paying at the point of value" that open source enables. Follow our growing list of customers here and here.
   
   
4. GlassFish Performance. It's an understatement to say that GlassFish performs well. It is hands-down the fastest open source application server. I've seen many customer benchmarks comparing GlassFish to closed source application servers, and GlassFish has either met or exceeded the competition. When price is thrown into the equation, customers begin to ask themselves "Why am I currently paying up to $50K/CPU for my closed source application server?"
   
   
5. FishCat launched. Proof that open source innovation does not have to be limited to lines of code. Check out the contributor list that are constantly improving GlassFish quality.
   
   
6. GlassFish v3 Prelude.  For early adopters, this is a fully QA'd and supported release of GlassFish layered on an OSGi mickrokernel, with some nifty developer productivity features. While this release has a slightly different feature set than GlassFish v2, it'll eventually be a superset of Glassfish v2.
   
   
7. GlassFish on UStream. Eduardo launched an ongoing series of interactive community sessions on various topics, by both Sun and non-Sun community members. Active Q&A.
   
   
8. GlassFish Updates. While originally targeted for January 2008, GlassFish v2 UR1 was actually released *early* and pulled in to December 2007. Mid-2008 we released GlassFish v2 UR2 with bug fixes and performance enhancements. GlassFish v2.1 isn't far around the corner with additional bug fixes and performance improvements.
   
   
9. OpenMQ Updates. OpenMQ has been cruising along with it's latest 4.3 update. Highly peformant. Scalable (*really* scalable). Highly available. Bundled with GlassFish.
   
   
10. GlassFish ESB released. GlassFish ESB is Open ESB in commercial form. Supported. Feature rich. Java Business Integration support at its core.  Layers right on top of GlassFish. NetBeans Integration. Learn More.
    

Tuesday December 23, 2008

Jason has posted a couple of blog entries (here and here) on spiffing up the GlassFish admin console. We do get a *LOT* of positive feedback on the GlassFish administration console, both in feature-richness and ease-of-use. Jason and team are off to make a good thing even better, so feel free to provide feedback or ideas of your own to the team.

You'll see on these threads that I'm a bit of a party pooper. Jason and team have delivered a great console that a lot of folks like, and I worry that making too much of an improvement may interrupt those who feel comfortable with the existing console.  Please provide feedback to Jason and team. The more the merrier.

Monday December 22, 2008

After taking a look at Tom Daly's post on compelling price/performance, I thought I would take a slightly different approach. Tom's post covers the details of the recent 100% open source software result of 1197.1 JOPS@Standard using GlassFish, OpenSolaris and MySQL running on a Sun X4150 Server. The competitive results are also on quad-core X64 servers.

The data shown here includes 3 years of 24x7 phone support for each operating system, database, and application server.  This provides a more appropriate scenario for those deploying in a production environment. While Tom's post has the raw data, I'm just showing the updated $/JOP.

Required disclosure : SPEC and SPECjAppServer are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 11/05/2008. 2xSun Fire X4150 (8 cores, 2chips) and 1xSun Fire X4150 (4 cores, 1 chip) 1197.10 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 8 cores in application-tier of the benchmark: 1xHP BL460c (8 cores,2chips) and 1xHP BL480c (8 cores,2 chips) 2056.27 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 2 systems in application-tier of the benchmark: 2xDell PowerEdge 2950 (8 cores, 2 chips) and 1xDell PowerEdge R900 (4 chips, 24 cores) 4,794.33 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.

MySQL Pricing: https://shop.mysql.com/enterprise/
Oracle Price Book: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/eplext.pdf
Red Hat Server pricing: https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/
Sun OpenSolaris, GlassFish Enterprise Server pricing: http://tinyurl.com/SunSoftwareVolume

Tuesday December 16, 2008

I love to watch boxing. Big. Fan.  That's why when I read Sacha's post on open source business models - which questioned Sun's business model around GlassFish -  the first thing that came to mind was a boxing analogy. When you hit someone hard and they smile as if to say "You didn't hurt me", well, you've hurt them.

Sticking with the boxing analogy, Sacha's watched one fight tape in a GlassFish career that is racking up many wins. His post reflects having incomplete information. It's true, by the way, that Sun offers unlimited deployments of GlassFish for $25,000 - or should I say starting at $25,000 for organizations under 1000 employees.  When replaying the rest of the tapes, one can see that we have a tiered approach not all that different from the Java Enterprise System. The primary differences are that we group employees into tiers (to align with MySQL Enterprise Unlimited), and that the offering is for a single product instead of a multitude of products. Of course, GlassFish & MySQL Enterprise Unlimited makes a nice one-two punch. As for software infrastructure @ Sun, it's grown year over year.

Based on competitive intelligence, I know that JBoss offers site licenses as well, but it's unclear to me if JBoss/Red Hat has part numbers and dollar figures committed for an all-you-can-eat subscription. I can say that Sun puts a stake in the ground and assign a part number and dollar figure to an unlimited subscription - a commitment to the customer up front. How much are *you* paying for a JBoss Enterprise Application Platform site license?

Now to address Sacha's free training point, and to extend the boxing analogy well beyond its usefulness and probably effectiveness - Don King. One of the roles of a fight promoter is to drive attendance and revenue.  Regarding free training, it's a marketing promotion. Marketing has a budget, and we spend it as wisely as possible to drive maximum awareness and product adoption. Sporting events often take this approach to drive attendance.  When I attended a Chivas game recently, I wasn't too concerned about their long term viability when I got a free hat. Delivering free online training in a promotional context isn't going to break the bank. The content had already been created, after all. In fact, thanks Sacha for linking to our free glassfish training offer. As for any revenue "lost" to free training, we don't think quite that two-dimensionally. We're more than making it up when customers learn of the the strong value proposition of running GlassFish Enterprise Server on CoolThreads servers (a billion dollar business in-and-of-itself), and backed by the newly introduced Sun StorEdge 7000 Unified Storage system.

GlassFish adoption is through the roof, both in downloads and registrations. I personally like to take a look at the GlassFish GeoMap upon occasion as a reward for all the hard work that has been put forth by Sun and the GlassFish community.  I can emphatically say that this success is being followed up with a rapidly growing number of GlassFish Enterprise Server subscribers who value the support and service Sun provides.

To sum it up, when I see a blog post ending with "Sun being desperate" and "hail mary", I see a competitor trying to instill Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt - FUD.  That means the competition is smiling (errr, smarting) after they've been hit pretty good.  Me? I stay away from FUD and prefer to stick to the facts.