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.