Justin Lee

Most of the Java loving world has probably already upgraded to OS X 10.5 which has an official, Apple sanctioned Java 6 implementation available.  However, some of you might be stuck on 10.4 for whatever reason (as I was until today...) and are desperate for some Java 6 love.  When doing some work just this morning on gfv3, I finally ran into a Java 6 only reference that I couldn't get around.  After some flailing and whining, I was reminded of soylatte (a colleague here at sun has been using it) which is built off the openjdk sources.

I grabbed that 10.4 build and extracted it and gave it a spin.  If you're a *nix-head like myself, configuring your shell to use soylatte is a trivial process.  Despite my best efforts, however, I failed to find a way to configure OS X to use soylatte in general rather than Apple's 1.5 VM.  So I had to resort to running IntelliJ IDEA on 1.5 but I could register soylatte as a platform VM inside IDEA and run my apps using that.  And that seemed to work quite well.  I can verify that gfv3 does indeed run on soylatte and that makes me very happy.  It made me happy for about 30 minutes until the UPS man showed up with my OS X upgrade DVD with which I could upgrade and get a formal release instead.  But it was an interesting exercise and hopefully anyone else stuck on 10.4 can use this hint as well.  It certainly would've made staying on 10.4 for a longer period much more palatable.

As much as I wanted to part of the GlassFish v3 Prelude festivities, I didn't really have anything to contribute. See, I started with Sun on the code freeze day for v3 prelude so I had 0 to do with prelude. :) Anyway, I'm the newest(?) member of the webtier team and will be working a number of different items leading up to the 3.0 spec release as part of the EE 6 release next year. There's always v3 FCS day, I suppose. :)

As for who I am, I'm a long time java user (since '96ish). I've been building web applications for most of that actually starting in the pre-JSP days and most recently using Wicket. I'm very excited to work under the hood for a change especially during this major revision cycle underway. One of my roles here at Sun is, of course, to blog about the work going on with GFv3 and especially our web container work. Full blown blogs might not be as frequent as I sometimes wish, but I have a twitter stream that I'm trying to use for more of the quick notes that aren't really quite blog worthy. (I admit I have low blog-stamina these days). I'll try to post either here or on twitter some of the things I come across as a relative newbie to this code. Perhaps my efforts to get elbow deep in glassfish code might help some of you who have been wondering how and where to get started.

In any case, it's nice to meet. Hopefully I'll see you around...