The Clingan Zone

Friday June 27, 2008

While other vendors are raising their prices, Sun decided to do just the opposite. We decided to save the customer money. In fact, not only can customers save money now, going forward they can scale their business without having to scale their budget. Introducing GlassFish & MySQL Unlimited, an offering that combines two fast, reliable, and very popular products, based on open source, into a single subcription offering.

Starting at $65,000, a customer can deploy as much GlassFish Enterprise Server and MySQL Enterprise Server as needed to meet business requirements. No counting CPUs. No counting cores. No audits or true-ups. No counting servers. And you don't have to "go back to the well" and ask for more money.

Do the Oracle math. Don't forget to double the price-per-socket for quad-core x86 servers and for 8-core Niagara servers. And add support.

Do the Sun math. For organizations up to 1,000 employees, it's a $65,000/year for unlimited use. If you want 24x7x365 support for GlassFish Enterprise Server (for a more fair comparison), it's $80,000/year. No worries, the MySQL component already includes 24x7x365 support among other things. The offering extends beyond 1,000 employees, but you get the point.

Do the math using your budget. Just think of what you can do with what you save! If you can't think of what you can do with the savings, rumor has it that Java CAPS 6 is a great deal :-)

Note: Mark has some math as well.

Monday May 12, 2008

It's been nearly 5 months since I've last blogs. Clearly I'm in the realm of the non-blogging heathen. No excuses. Mea culpa.

The good news is that the GlassFish community has been plugging away at GlassFish with substantial progress.  There have been hiccups along the way and surely there are more to come, but overall GlassFish is forging ahead nicely.  Here's a summary of GlassFish happenings at JavaOne 2008.

•  Product name change. "Sun Java System Application Server" was renamed to "Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server".  The new name inherently describes the relationship between open source product and the Sun product. Simply stated, Sun offers support of GlassFish through the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server.
  
• GlassFish Enterprise Server Unlimited. Deploy as much GlassFish Enterprise Server as you want, starting at $25K. That's less than deploying some competitive application servers to a single T5140. I don't have the web page up for the Unlimited offering yet. This is one of those afore-mentioned hiccups.
  
• Partner Initiative for Sun Partner Advantage program. Over 40 GlassFish partners! Check out the partner showcase. Want to become a GlassFish partner? Here's how.
  
• GlassFish v3 Technology Preview 2. You may recall Technology Preview 1 (TP1) at last year's JavaOne. Since then we have been busy delivering multiple releases of GlassFish v2. Not resting on our GlassFish v3 laurels, Technology Preview 2 delivers the following over last year's Technology Preview 1. I'm sure I'm forgetting something but I'll chalk it up to being way past my bedtime :-)
  
• Support for OSGi
• Dynamically extend GlassFish v3 by adding modules to the lib directory.
• Java Persistence API, JDBC Connection Pooling
• File & JDBC Realm support, SSL support
  
• Complete asadmin command line interface support.
• NetBeans support, with GlassFish v3 available in NetBeans update center
  
• Update Center support with Solaris IPS packaging. The following components are available using the update center:
  
• Web administration console (subset of GlassFish v2 console)
• Partial EJB 3.1 support (stateless session beans w/local interface)
  
• EclipseLink
• jMaki, JSF, Woodstock
• JRuby runtime, Grails support
  
• Project Jersey REST apis (JAX-RS)
• Metro Web Services stack
  
• Project WebSynergy. Bringing together the best of LifeRay and OpenPortal with GlassFish. Check out The Aquarium writeup.
• GlassFish ESB. Read all about it.
• Sun GlassFish Communications Server. Sun's SIP-enabled application server based on Project SailFin. SailFin, in turn, is based on GlassFish.
• GlassFish Unconference. Arrived late due to a delayed flight. However, I had the pleasure to lead the "Production & Performance" discussion. Learned a lot about how folks are deploying GlassFish. Looks like we can improve NetBeans integration by addressing a bug or two. The good news is that we received multiple kudos for GlassFish ease-of-use and for call flow monitoring.
• GlassFish Party. I can neither confirm nor deny I over-consumed alcoholic beverages. Hiccup (unrelated to afore-mentioned hiccups).
  
• GlassFish BOF. Picked up some good feedback at the BOF on how to improve GlassFish.

Friday December 21, 2007

First off, I'd like to give a big thanks to Julien Ponge for the GlassFish V2UR1 lzPack powered installer. Impressive. Works like a charm. I thought I'd blog about the Mac installer. The installer defaults to installation in the /Applications directory. If you choose to do this, odds are you will run into problems with not being able to create the domain directory during the configuration step due to a lack of permissions to write to the /Applications/GlassFish directory.

There are a couple of options.

1. Continue installation in /Applications directory. The setup fails to create the domain, but you can create the domain after the fact and point to a user-writable directory as follows:
   
   # /Applications/GlassFish/bin/asadmin create-domain --domaindir /Users/jclingan/domains --adminport 4848 mydomain
   # /Applications/GlassFish/bin/asadmin start-domain --domaindir /Users/jclingan/domains
   
   Note /Users/jclingan/domains is a top-level directory for GlassFish domains, so a mydomain subdirectory will be placed under that directory. Most folks don't know about the --domaindir option so I thought this option might be useful to cover.
   
   
2. Select a different install directory. Simply choose a subdirectory off of your home directory, such as /Users/jclingan/GlassFish. This is similar to what you would do with the jar installer and the permissions issue goes away entirely, resulting in a clean install.
   

Thanks, Julien, for the effort. A very welcome addition!

Wednesday December 19, 2007

Three months after the release of GlassFish V2, we already have an update release. Alexis has a good writeup of what's in this release. I'd like to point out a few items in a bit more detail.

First, the Update Center is getting more visibility. It's a great GlassFish feature that many developers do not even know exists! A growing number packages are available and plug right into GlassFish. We are also trying to grow the number of packages as well, both with community input or by the community itself. Example: Open ESB is right there, click, click, restart. Your ready. Or Try jMaki (no restart required).

Next, the support center offers up-to-date information of all kinds, aggregating a ton of information into one convenient location. In particular, I like the feed showing the list of bugs fixed. It should be noted that this feature does require product registration. On a related note,  many bugs have been fixed. For those of you waiting for an update release before you deploy, well, here it is.

Thursday September 27, 2007

Looks like BEA is taking notice of GlassFish. Bill Roth offered some counter-arguments to our "10% better performance than BEA WebLogic 9.x" comparison, which is both expected and an appropriate thing to do. Bill asked some open-ended questions which I addressed for the benefit of the BEA community. I also offered some clarification around some of the points that Bill made so the WebLogic community has a better understanding of the GlassFish community. Bill's a busy guy (moderated comments) and the blogosphere is a moving window of conversation. In fear of missing the that window, here is a copy of the comment I submitted to Bill's blog.

Update: Alexis has a view on subject as well.
Update: Thorleif chose GlassFish over WebLogic (2nd comment) for the very reasons stated below.
Update: Hmmm, Bill never published my original comment to his blog, only the courtesy FYI ...
Update: Bill's SPAM catcher got in the way (see comments). No worries Bill, my email filter occasionally junk-mails my own emails :-)
 

---

Bill, GlassFish V2 and the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 are essentially the same, with the latter applying the Sun brand, indemnification and support.  Sun benchmarked the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 instead of GlassFish V2 because SPEC rules require a supported product. I highly recommend that instead of asking open-ended questions, you engage the GlassFish community via the user forums or the mailing lists where these and future questions can be easily addressed. To be completely transparent, I've updated the GlassFish User FAQ with the differences (GUI installer, 3rd party JDBC drivers, HADB) between GlassFish and the Sun Java System Application Server. These are not "significant differences" in our view.

Regarding our JVM, we don't need to be "pressed", simply asked (refer to the previous comment on user forum and mailing list). Yes, there are performance improvements between Java SE 5 and Java SE 6. However, since neither BEA WebLogic 9 nor BEA WebLogic 10 support Java SE 6, WebLogic customers cannot benefit from these performance improvements. It is good to hear that BEA has improved WebLogic tuning since the last submission since that benefits the larger Java community. The GlassFish community has made significant performance improvements between GlassFish V1 and GlassFish V2. The GlassFish community continues to actively work to improve performance across the board in a variety of areas.

I'll concede that benchmarking is a game of leapfrog. The main point is that GlassFish is performance competitive and extremely feature/price competitive at $4,500 for 4 sockets, which is why Gartner, Forrester, and Current Analysis are taking notice.

Thanks.

John Clingan
Sun Application Server Product Manager
http://blogs.sun.com/jclingan
 

Saturday September 22, 2007

What a difference two weeks make. Two weeks ago I was pulling (what's left of) my hair out trying to get the T's crossed and the i's dotted on GlassFish before the Monday launch. Pre-and-post-launch I've have been talking to potential customers, the sales force, analysts and the press. The word is getting out and the feedback is extremely positive.

I can't help feel that this GlassFish launch is the start of something great. Yes, Sun has had an application server (in one form or another) for almost a decade. Yes, GlassFish V1 has been around for over a year - even in production. But it all seems to have come together with GlassFish V2. Grrreat performance. New cost-efficient subscriptions for support. Enterprise ready. Open source community. Fully Java EE 5 compatible. The value proposition is looking good.  Not to put ASCII in their HTML, but Gartner seems to agree.

As we, the community, move forward, I'll do my best to keep everyone abreast of GlassFish momentum. The message may not always come from The Clingan Zone, but I've got prolific friends :-)

Monday September 17, 2007

There is a good reason for the rather long pause at The Clingan Zone. As mentioned previously, I moved out of the field and into corporate as the GlassFish Group Product Manager. In that role, I have been working in the background doing my part to help move GlassFish V2 towards the goal line. As of today, we've crossed that line. GlassFish V2 is formally released!!

GlassFish V1, the first Java EE 5 application server available, focused on developers with Java EE 5 ease-of-development features, low resource consumption, dynamic resource configuration, etc.  GlassFish V2 adds out-of-the-box enterprise features. In particular:

• Clustering - Cluster for scalability high-availability. New to GlassFish V2 is in-memory session replication for high availability; robust and easy to set up. For 5 9's of availability Sun continues to offer HADB.
  
• Advanced administration - From a centralized GUI console (or  CLI) users can manage and monitor the clusters and applications. Clusters can be created and grown dynamically to meet user demand.
  
• Best-in-class performance - GlassFish V2 offers great performance and is the fastest open source application server available. In fact, GlassFish V2 is 10% faster than BEA WebLogic 9.x on the same hardware (compare here and here).
  
• Microsoft .NET 3.0 Web services Interoperability - At it's core,  Project Metro offers industry-leading web services performance with JAX-WS. In addition, Sun (through Project Metro) and Microsoft have worked together to ensure secure, reliable, transactional and high performance web services interoperability between Java EE and Microsoft .NET 3.0.
  

Enterprise features do not compromise ease-of-use. To date the feedback we have received on ease-of-use has been overwhelmingly positive, especially for clustered deployments. Ease-of-use will be a top-level theme for GlassFish V3 (more on that in a later post).

Sun's commercially available counterpart to GlassFish V2, the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1, is offered with new annual subscriptions for support, including live transfer for issues impacting production availability. In fact, we have dropped prices by up to 75% to be in line with other open source offerings. Yep, you can buy online. Note, GlassFish V2 is at feature parity with the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 - we're not penalizing the open source community for committing to open source bits.  However, if production support is required to reduce the impact of production issues, we have your back. With great out-of-the-box enterprise features and cost-efficient pricing, the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 offer a great value proposition whether you are an enterprise looking to drive down costs or a startup looking for a low barrier to entry.

Download GlassFish V2 or Sun's commercialized counterpart, the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1. Take it for a spin. Have questions? Check the documentation or the FAQ on how to get help.
 

Thursday June 14, 2007

Arun has the details on the offer - and hurry! Only 2 days left. It will take less time to post an entry on the topic than it will to go pick up a Lotto ticket. While the offer doesn't compare to Lotto winnings, the odds are significantly more in your favor ;-)

You may be wondering if you have to say something nice about GlassFish to win. Nope. Be honest (and professional :-) ). Honest feedback goes a long way. We hope that others learn something important about GlassFish from what you post. However, I think that it is equally important that we - the GlassFish team - learn something. We may learn ...

• ... something new on how GlassFish is used in practice
• ... that some part of GlassFish needs to be improved
• ... that you have got a framework running on GlassFish and are the first to blog about it.
• ... why you chose to use GlassFish with sssoooo many options available
• ... that you just wanted a 52" LCD HD TV and would do anything to get it :-)
  

Saturday June 09, 2007

"Tired of your dead end job? Why not work from home and live the lifestyle you've always dreamed about!  Make $50,000 per month with our Real Income Plan and the complete business affiliate guide."

Given how much I plaster my email address across the blogosphere, I'm surprised I don't get more SPAM like this. We must have *very* good SPAM filters. I get about 10 a day in my email. That's about 3% of my daily email. Not bad.

This particular SPAM caught my eye given I've been in the role of GlassFish Group Product Manager for roughly 2 months. I'm currently looking at what seems to be an endless list of things to do and learn in this role. That doesn't leave much time for Solaris or Zones tinkering. Not much time for coding either. Not much time for lunch (seriously).

On the other hand, I'm picking up a whole new set of skills, which is great. Building a new set of relationships - inside and outside of Sun - while leveraging many of the relationships I already have. What came as second nature before is not second nature now. It takes much longer to do things as I have to navigate a whole new set of contacts and processes. The good news is that I've got one hell of a team to work with as I learn the ropes. Skilled. Motivated. Professional. Fun.

Let's just say I'm far from a dead end job. I'd say its more like a new beginning.

Sunday May 13, 2007

This is a first. 5 days of JavaOne and I only attended 2.5 sessions. I spent time meeting customers, partners and doing booth duty. I've mentioned a couple of times the passion of the GlassFish team. While the sign-up sheet was split into 2-hour shifts, many worked the booth far more than that. Being new to the role of GlassFish Product Manager, I am eager to talk to folks. Here's a summary of what I saw and heard (in no particular order):

• JavaOne generated tremendous awareness of GlassFish. Great booth activity. Being next to the NetBeans booth helped :-)
  
• Many GlassFish V1 users wanting to learn of GlassFish V2 features, especially in-memory replication, as well as GlassFish V3 modules and enhanced multi-language support. Note, multi-language capability is available today through Phobos.
  
• Many already using GlassFish in production, wanting to understand support options
• Lots of interest from those with appservers already in production, wanting to move to an open source Java EE application server. Most are evaluating GlassFish, JBoss and Geronimo.
  
• GlassFish Day was well attended. When you see Jerome getting into the gory details of GlassFish V3 modules and the room remaining packed, followed by him being overwhelmed at the podium afterwards, you know your on to something. This is a good leading indicator of what is to come from the growing GlassFish community.
• Impressive sales leads
• Strong interest from ISVs in joining partner ecosystem.

Thursday May 10, 2007

Working the JavaOne GlassFish booth has been extremely rewarding. First, the message about GlassFish is getting out. The booth has been very busy. In some cases, folks are already using GlassFish and the rest want to learn more.

Walking around the floor yesterday confirmed my thoughts regarding the breadth of GlassFish adoption already happening. For example, the folks at the Joyent booth had a laptop screen with "GlassFish Hosting Here". I had no idea but me-thinks I have Ben Rockwood to thank for that :-) In addition, the TeleLogic folks were using GlassFish to demonstrate their enterprise architecture tools. The first three booths I hit yesterday were using GlassFish. Ericsson was the 3rd, but I knew that going in.

Wednesday May 09, 2007

I'm liking Twitter in a major way for letting others know what I am doing at JavaOne, and for me keeping up with others as well. I'm sure I have more than 7 friends on Twitter, but I just haven't had the time to build my twitter network.

For me, the big question is will I still use it post-J1? I think so, albeit not with the same punch output (I like to watch boxing :-) ). Only time will tell.

Monday May 07, 2007

I'll be roaming around CommunityOne  day. The only issue I have is that there is too much great content shoved in to too short a time period. I'd sure love to cross tracks into the OpenSolaris, NetBeans and Redmonk unConference tracks. I'm 100% committed to the GlassFish track, where where we expect both GlassFish veterans and a host of new users.

Here's the GlassFish track agenda:

• 10:00: General session (all tracks) 
• 11:00:  Getting Starting / What's new
• 12:10:  Lunch w/Jonathan Schwartz & Rich Green
• 1:15:  GlassFish in real life (Use Cass)
• 2:20: GlassFish partner ecosystem
• 5:00: GlassFish Futures w/V3
  

My goal at CommunityOne is to meet new GlassFish users, where I hope to learn about deployments, where GlassFish excels, and where it needs improvement.

Unfortunately I need to cut this post short. Time to head to the Moscone Center to sign up. 

Sunday May 06, 2007

Instead of only blogging about JavaOne this year, I've decided to follow others (eg: here & here)  add Twitter in to the mix. Feel free to subscibe to my twitter feed (via SMS, IM or RSS feed).

Twitter augments blogging on JavaOne because:

• Attending a conference is highly transactional, from meeting people, attending sessions and seeing something new and cool on the show floor
• My cell phone battery lasts longer than my laptop battery.
• More frequent updates because I can send SMS messages while standing in line(s) for sessions.

Does this mean I will not blog on JavaOne? Nope. I'll blog while at JavaOne. But the blog posts will be less frequent and, honestly, more thought out and strategic in nature.

Time to go spend time with the family before I leave for the week.

Sunday April 22, 2007

While others describe Ubuntu on Parallels on Mac, that simply doesn't work for me.  I run Solaris on X86 (Nevada build 60 on a Tecra M2 to be precise). Thanks to Qemu for Solaris, I can test it out. During the Glassfish install & run I took a couple of screen snapshots. The image on the right shows Glassfish in the Synaptic package manager. The brown-ish square is Ubuntu running on Qemu. The image below shows Firefox on Ubuntu displaying the Glassfish console. The browser in the background and the task bar at the bottom are both running on  Solaris. You may be asking why the display shows the Sun Java System Application Server. As posted at The Aquarium, The Sun Java System Application Server is Sun's name for our distribution of Glassfish. The only difference between the two is the installer.

FYI, Ubuntu integrates more than Glassfish, it includes the Sun Java SE 6 JDK, Java DB and NetBeans 5.5.

So you may be asking yourself, why the heck run Glassfish on Ubuntu on Qemu on Solaris on X86 when it runs just fine directly on Solaris on X86? One answer is "because I can". Another is that it makes an interesting blog post - or at least I think it does :-) Most importantly, it lets me stay on top of the Glassfish user experience on the most popular desktop Linux distribution. The overall experience was simple and uneventful, which is just the way I like my installs to go.