Yesterday, we released new versions of two of the products in our GlassFish Portfolio, delivering on what we announced a few weeks ago at Oracle Open World.

The first is GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1.  This is a minor release but includes some important bug fixes and updates to several component packages including JSF, Grizzly, Jersey, and  OpenMQ.  More details are on the community wiki.

Building upon GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1 is GlassFish Communications Server v2.  Built in open-source in the Sailfin community, this product provides a robust Java EE and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) convergence platform and in this release adds SIP session replication, Diameter support, and more.  Eduardo has a nice summary in The Aquarium.

You may download GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1 or GlassFish Communications Server v2 so give them a try.  If you want more info or are interested in getting commercial support, added features, and more, contact us or try our online chat with someone that can help you.

As I mentioned last week, we were able to get a number of talks on Java EE 6 at Oracle Open World and the Oracle Develop conference going on as I write this in San Francisco.  In looking for folks thoughts and reactions to what they saw, I came across a blog entry by Cay Horstmann that I thought hit on a bunch of the key points we were hoping to share there so deserved a mention.

A few quotes from his blog:

"I cannot overemphasize how much simpler EE6 is than just about any web programming model I know. All of the bad parts of the old EJB are gone. No XML. No crazy packaging of WARs and JARs inside EARs. Annotate your beans and persistent objects, and let the container worry about the database, transactions, clustering, and so on."

"Similarly, if you haven't given GlassFish v3 a try, you are in for a very pleasant surprise. It is fast. Startup is not just faster than JBoss, but faster than Tomcat! Hot deployment works great, there is a nice admin UI and a scriptable command line interface, and the Eclipse and Netbeans integrations are first-rate. I can't see myself going back to Tomcat—there just would be no point."

If you want to learn more, visit glassfish.org and download GlassFish v3 Preview which will give you early access to these new capabilities Cay mentions.

Oracle Open World comes around every fall and while Sun has been a sponsor in the past, for the first time, at least in my recent memory, we will have sessions for Sun software, specifically around Java, and more specifically for my interests around Java EE.  And not only are we at Open World but we are at the smaller Oracle Develop event being run at the same time.

At Open World, the Java EE specific sessions are:

• S312765 - Java Platform, Enterprise Edition: The Foundation and Future of Your Enterprise - Tom Kincaid - Monday 4pm-5pm Marriott Salon 4
• S312767 - Easy Database Access from Java with Java Persistence API 2.0 - Linda DeMichiel - Wednesday 10:15am-11:15am Marriott Nob Hill AB

I mentioned Amazon.com lowering pricing for EC2 in my links entry today, but having great pricing is only useful if you have something to deploy on EC2.  And a great way to deploy applications is in GlassFish.

Now, anyone can install everything from scratch on their EC2 instance, but Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are a great way to get a head start with a pre-installed/configured operating system and other software.  As you might expect, for someone wanting to use GlassFish there are several AMIs available.

My quick perusal came across the following GlassFish and related AMIs:

• OpenSolaris 2008.11 With GlassFish 2.1 and MySQL 5.1 Provided by Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Everything you need to get started with OpenSolaris, MySQL, and GlassFish.
• GlassFish ESB v2.1 on OpenSolaris 2008.11 32-bit AMI - For those wanting to take the step up from GlassFish to incorporate routing, transformation, and orchestration in their applications.  See Hari's blog for more info.
• OpenSSO AMIs - Running in GlassFish, provides for single-signon and Web services security.

As we near the end of our Q4 our sales force in going full bore on closing deals to help continue the great momentum we've built up around our middleware this year (see the FY09 growth numbers in the "MySQL / Infrastructure" row of slide 5 of the Q3 financial slides).  But selling software to customers is not where it ends as each customer is buying the software to help solve a business problem and deliver an ROI and business value for their organization.  That is why it is rewarding to see the success stories our terrific reference team publishes on sun.com.

A sampling of some of the recent published stories includes:

•  Medavie Blue Cross - Implemented an SOA built with Sun products and technologies including GlassFish ESB, OpenSSO, and NetBeans in order to simplify application development and integration increasing agility and flexibility.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.
• TravelMuse - Innovative travel and vacation site saved $200K in licensing costs and cut hosting costs by 50% through their use of GlassFish Enterprise Server, MySQL Enterprise, and other Sun software and hardware.  They too generously created a podcast.
• Pretium Telecom - Using GlassFish Enterprise Server and GlassFish ESB, Pretium replaced its existing SOA infrastructure with an open-source model that provides all of the required functionality in a less complex, more flexible framework accelerating development cycles 50% and cutting TCO 50%.
• Equifax - Using the full spectrum of software from Sun under a Java Enterprise System subscription, from GlassFish Enterprise Server to the Portal Server to OpenSSO to Identity Manager, Equifax cut costs, increased revenue, and streamlined audits.
• Bâloise Insurance - Using Identity Manager, Bâloise created an integrated platform for assigning and approving access based on employee business roles gaining transparency into business and IT roles and reducing provisioning time.

 

GlassFish ESB was released earlier this year and included as part of GlassFish Portfolio, but that was just the start as a new minor release, v2.1, has just been made available that continues what was started and adds in some important new capabilities.  A sampling of those includes:

• Clustering for all components is now supported.
• The Intelligent Event Processor (IEP) for performing complex event processing is now included in the installer.
• The Scheduler BC is also included in the installer.
• Support for NetBeans has been updated to version 6.5.1.
• The included and supported GlassFish Enterprise Server has been updated to v2.1 and AIX is now supported.
• Numerous other enhancements to existing components that you can read in the release notes.

 

JavaOne (and CommunityOne) 2009 were last week and I spent the bulk of my week there at the event.  All in all, especially given the state of the economy, I thought it was well attended and there was a host of great sessions and content.

It started off with CommunityOne on Monday with a keynote and announcements around the Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris.  And while the keynote gave the day a cloud/OS feel, the rest of the day had many sessions on lots of topics including those near and dear to my heart, server side Java.

JavaOne itself kicked off Tuesday morning with the main Sun keynote with Jonathan showing some neat JavaFX stuff, announcing the Java Store, and bringing up executives from eBay, RIM, Sony, and more.  There was also a cute video that had James' Gospel of Java.  It finished with Scott reminiscing a bit and bringing Larry Ellison on stage for some Q&A.  Bob Brewin's technical keynote also went well with demos on Fuji, Java EE 6, Java SE 7, Java FX, and the architecture of the Java Store.

It was then off to technical sessions and I was able to attend several on OpenSSO, Java EE 6, Fuji, CEP, Camel, and more.  Look for presentations to be published soon.  I also spent some time in the Pavilion and traffic there kept things nice and busy.

If you weren't there, sorry you missed it, but take a look at what is available on-line that I linked to above.

It should come as no surprise that JavaOne 2009 is approaching, and not only approaching but right around the corner next week!  This year I'm more involved than ever in our Software Infrastructure group's planning for it, so I thought I'd share a bit to pique folks interest.

The activities officially get started with the third annual CommunityOne West on Monday June 1st.  Why "West" you might ask?  That's because there was a CommunityOne East this year in New York where Sun made announcements about its Cloud and more.  Basic access to CommunityOne is free (you can't beat that!) with access to "Deep Dives" or a package including JavaOne access available.  And Pavilion passes for JavaOne are also free this year plus early bird registration has been extended through the start of the show.

JavaOne itself gets started Tuesday June 2nd with the Sun General Session.  This should be a jam packed session with great stuff from Jonathan and perhaps some surprises.  The other keynotes from Sun and the other sponsors are always fantastic as well but I have a special interest in Bob Brewin's technical keynote on Tuesday afternoon as I'm working with him and the technical experts on it.

There are a host of technical sessions, BOFs, and Sun along with all of the co-sponsors and exhibitors will be in the pavilion.  And the pavilion actually opens early this year, during CommunityOne so you'll have more time to explore.  A full searchable content calendar is available here, but I've also created my own agenda of key/interesting sessions on Google calendar.  Now, there is a bit of a slant towards server side technologies and architectures like SOA, REST, Identity Services, GlassFish, etc., but you may still find it interesting and/or useful.

See you there!

I came across a good InformationWeek article, InformationWeek Analytics: State Of SOA, that I thought summarized nicely some common perceptions of SOA, its use, and trends that developers and customers should be tuned into, notably that there is an increased interest in "path of least resistance" approaches using the technology of the Web, i.e. a RESTful style.  One especially on target quote was:

"The REST philosophy has simplicity going for it, and when resources get tight, faster and easier usually wins. However, the two styles can complement each other; it doesn't have to be a case of one or the other. A REST-based approach is a natural for data-oriented applications that focus on simple database look-up scenarios. Many apps fit this model, especially on the Web."

I take two things away from that, the first that it isn't WS-* vs REST, they can and should co-exist, but the other is that REST is well suited to data-oriented applications or situations where you are accessing or manipulating a resource rather than calling a service.  I can think of many data oriented scenarios (think MySQL) where simple RESTful APIs would be ideal for developers building web applications.

So if one is weary of traditional WS-* SOA and is looking for RESTful alternatives (the term WOA, coined by Gartner's Nick Gall several years ago, is sometimes used), where can they turn?  Take a look at the Jersey project in the GlassFish community on java.net.  Jersey is where the reference implementation of JSR-311, or JAX-RS, has been developed and can be used on its own or easily obtained as part of GlassFish v3 Prelude.

You can also take a look at this blog or this blog to learn more, or plan on attending JavaOne or CommunityOne this year where there will be sessions, labs, and BOFs on Jersey, Identity Services, and more things RESTful.

Today we announce the release of the GlassFish Portfolio.  You can find more information at www.sun.com/glassfish and there will be many bloggers that outline the contents of the offering (WebStack, GlassFish Enterprise Server, GlassFish ESB, GlassFish Web Space Server, and optionally the GlassFish Communications Server) and how these map to primary application scenarios (Web/LAMP development, Java EE, SOA/integration, and collaboration), the simple and MySQL aligned pricing starting at $999 per server per year (saving up to 90% over proprietary alternatives), and more, so I thought I'd instead focus on how this release extends Sun's innovation and creativity in adopting and providing enterprise support for many different types of open-source.

There are several different types of open-source models, and the GlassFish Portfolio is the first offering to combine all of these in an enterprise supported offering.

First you have company led open-source.  This is where a single vendor leads an open-source community and contributes the majority of the code and IP.  This is the probably the "traditional" open-source model where a company puts their code/product into open-source but stills offers support/licenses/etc. on the open-source or a derived commercial product.  The GlassFish and OpenESB communities started this way and continue to have Sun as the major contributors.

Second you have third parties that contribute to a company led open-source community.  This is where an open-source community really takes off and gains momentum as a broader audience sees value in collaboration and contribution.  The contribution by Ericsson of the SIP servlet technology to the Sailfin community (included in the GlassFish Communications Server) and the 20+ components contributed by many developers and organizations to the OpenESB community are examples of this.

Third, and where things get more interesting, is when there is collaboration in multiple non-company led open-source communities.  This is where either through joint collaboration or developers proving themselves and having interesting IP/code to contribute, developers from company A obtain commit rights into non-company led open-source project or community.  Sun's contribution to and collaboration with Liferay and contributions into the Apache community are examples of this.

What is truly innovative about the GlassFish Portfolio is that it brings all of these models together in an enterprise supported offering with support options ranging from patches to call-in support to 24x7 support with dedicated customer advocates.  Because Sun is doing all the work to meld the different open-source models and communities together, customers gain the benefit and don't have to worry about the "hidden costs" of open-source.  And because we have commit rights into the communities, we can provide patches and enterprise support without any fear of forking.

With the GlassFish Portfolio, we meet you where you are.  If you are already using "LAMP" but have a bunch of different versions in different departments and just want someone to handle getting all the right versions together, testing it, and providing patches, the GlassFish Portfolio is for you.  If you want 24x7 support for your mission critical Java EE implementations, the GlassFish Portfolio is for you.  If you need to integrate into existing systems to build your web-facing applications, the GlassFish Portfolio is for you.  If you want to create a web space for collaboration within or between departments, the GlassFish Portfolio is for you.

So, take a look, learn more, and see how the GlassFish Portfolio can work for you.

 

I'm pleased to write that Sun will be a sponsor at Gartner's Master Data Management Summit November 17-19. This will be our first time sponsoring, so we are excited to be there.

Sponsoring for the first time does not mean that we are new to this space. Starting with e*Index 4.1 in 2000, continuing with eIndex and eView 5.0 and 5.1 in 2003 and 2006, and the release of our new MDM Suite as part of our Java CAPS Release 6 in June of this year, we have had an offering for MDM for quite some time.

If you are attending, stop by and say hi. If you aren't, consider doing so, even though Chicago in November probably isn't at the top of everyone's list.

I had the opportunity to travel to Munich for our EMEA Horizons event last week and had a fabulous set of meetings with our customers and partners sharing with them information, plans, and roadmaps around our products while hearing how they are using our products and what features and capabilities they are most interested in. All in all, a very worthwhile trip.

What the trip also allowed me to do was to experience travel and other behaviors in other countries and how they differ or compare to the United States, and perhaps see what we can learn from them.

The first thing one will notice of course is that passengers are treated differently (well?) on international flights and given a real meal (or several) for no extra charge. I even requested a special meal and found it quite tasty and satisfying (for airplane food) and would recommend that one look at what special meals are available and request one when flying internationally.

I had a connection in Amsterdam on my way to Munich, and something that is done at Schiphol airport is that escalators have motion sensors and turn off when not needed. This is a great idea, particularly for escalators that aren't in high traffic areas (this one was at a gate), but would seem like a very simple addition to any escalator that would help save energy costs. As you will read below, I found other cases where Europe seems to be more energy conscious than we are.

When going through security at European airports, they seem to be much more lax about making sure you remove liquids, shoes, coats, coins, etc. before going through the metal detector. I recall a trip a couple years ago where at London City Airport I was allowed to keep my heavy coat on with cell phone in pocket and nothing was triggered! On this trip I still followed US procedure out of habit, although the last time I went through security coming back at Schiphol I elected to leave my running shoes on (which have always been fine back in the day when I was allowed to keep them on in the states) and was just fine. To be fair this did vary someone from airport to airport (and even different sections of security at the same airport) but in general it was not surprising to see someone go through the detector and set it off. What was surprising is that when this happened, rather than sending the person back to remove things and go through again, they just elected to wand them down right there. It slowed the line down a bit but perhaps less than making everyone follow a strict procedure?

As I had time when I arrived, I took the opportunity to take public transportation rather than taking a taxi, both to save money (€9.20 vs €56!) and to experience a bit more of the culture. I couldn't figure out the automated ticket machine so did queue up to buy the ticket, but once I had it it was a nice and painless trip with one train change to a stop right in front of the Sun office. If you do have the time, I highly recommend using public transportation when visiting Europe rather than just hoping in a taxi.

At the Sun office in Munich, as is the case at many other Sun offices, motion sensors are used in rooms to turn lights off when not needed. What I hadn't seen at other Sun offices is that this was applied to halls too, taking the energy consciousness a step further. Another cool thing at the Sun office is that when there is a door in the hallway, there is a sticker on the door with both an arrow indicating the direction the door opens (away or towards you) but they are also color coded with red for towards you (warning, it can open towards you) or green for away from you. Very nifty idea that address those situations when you approach a door and don't know which way it opens so you can avoid the push or pull that is met with resistance.

At the hotel, the eco-friendliness was continued with the hallways having motion sensors, again saving what would otherwise be wasted energy. I have to wonder why this isn't done more widely in the US. Of course, the hotel also had a doorway to the stairwell that was 1.85 meters tall, and at 6'2" I am 1.88 meters and alas I did hit my head once. Ouch.

Some other observations were lots and lots of Audi's, Mercedes, Volkswagen's, and other interesting cars in Germany (the taxi's are very nice cars!), feeling safe on the autobahn while driving 150 kph (very nice, perhaps that is why the taxi's are high end cars), friendly people, and too much more to try to detail here.

I blogged about our new offer and TCO calculator a couple of days ago and thought I'd share some of the response thus far.

The Register wrote that "Sun has capitalized on Oracle jacking up licensing of the BEA middleware products with an offer for its own open-source suite". And drilling into the "jacking up" link in that story gets to you this where Larry Ellison reportedly "told another customer who'd ripped chips from his server just to pay his Oracle license to basically put up and shut up, because things ain't getting cheaper". There's a company that is interested in customer satisfaction!

InfoWorld's article quotes Brad Shimmin from Current Analysis saying "My overall impression is that Sun has seized upon a legitimate market opportunity here, stemming from the usual FUD surrounding the rationalization and integration of two such daunting product portfolios (Oracle and BEA) and more uniquely the purported price increase Oracle announced for WebLogic in July".

The SOA Talk blog also wrote on the subject and included a link to their prior story on the acquisition and skeptical customers saying "BEA users do not want Oracle products".

Interesting stuff. Take a look to learn more.

As you are probably aware, Oracle announced significant price hikes for much of its software including the application server and other integration middleware in the wake of their acquisition of BEA. In light of this, we thought it would be useful to do some comparisons of the pricing for Sun's middleware against the new pricing and found that Sun's offerings provided a significant cost savings over the equivalent Oracle offerings in nearly every situation. Furthermore, our innovative subscription pricing model gives companies an alternative that can save even more money in most cases, reduce the large upfront capital expense traditionally associated with acquiring enterprise software, and eliminate "socket counting" audits that must be done with most perpetual licensing.

Rather than keep our research a secret, we've created an on-line calculator to allow anyone to put in the specifics of their environment and company and see the potential cost savings for themselves. I encourage you to visit sun.com/logic yourself to enter your own scenarios, but something as simple as a 20 socket, 4 cores per socket license on x64 hardware has a 5 year TCO with Sun's offering that is over 72% less than the equivalent with Oracle WebLogic or Fusion.

If you visit the site, you'll also see that we are running a limited time offer that includes:

• A FREE 5 day SOA workshop
• Complimentary adapter for WebLogic
• An opportunity to lock-in our current pricing for 12 months

To take us up on this offer, you'll need to register so do so today!

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been "the thing" in the integration world the past few years with vendors latching on to the term and enhancing or creating new products that support all aspects of SOA such as ESBs and BPM/orchestration tools. All the while, customers have been continuing to implement standard EAI patterns using point to point integration products and Message Oriented Middleware (MoM) for publish and subscribe solutions. These EAI solutions continue to work today, but increasingly are being asked to move more and more from batch based processing to real time and event driven processing.

Enter Event Driven Architecture, or EDA. EDA takes the principles of SOA such as loosely coupled components and services, and applies them to event emitters and consumers. In a way, where SOA provides loose coupling for synchronous service invocations, EDA provides loose coupling for asynchronous systems. In this way, EDA is very complimentary to SOA.

But EDA goes beyond just asynchronous systems and enters into Event Stream Processing and Complex Event Processing (CEP). Event Processing provides for receiving events from any source, and aggregating, correlating, analyzing, monitoring, and otherwise processing the events. Additionally where SOA is typically used to process individual requests in isolation from others, Event Processing handles events from multiple sources in the context of previous events providing new insight into the behaviors of systems and users.

The result of this processing can be to trigger other processes or send alerts in response to thresholds being exceeded, or to use the aggregated events for reporting for dashboard applications. Applications of Event Processing includes fraud detection, algorithmic trading, security monitoring, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and many more.

Sun's Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) has always had EDA capabilities given its roots in EAI and MoM and with the Intelligent Event Processor (IEP), we are adding the Event Processing capabilities that today's EDA's require to compliment the SOA capabilities inherent in Java CAPS. By having this be a component of a broader integration platform, the IEP can leverage the adapters and engines of the platform rather than having to recreate that functionality like a standalone CEP offering has to.

To learn more, visit the Open ESB Community where the IEP is being built. Additionally, see the August 2008 Java Developers Journal with an article on EDA and the IEP on page 16.