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.