I attended GlassFish Day today, a full-day (if you consider 1 P.M.-to-7:10 P.M. a full day) of presentations and demos on GlassFish-related topics. For those of you who aren't familiar with GlassFish, know that (1) it's an open-source project, (2) it's main deliverable is a Java EE 5-conforming application server, and (3) it delivers other technologies. If you want to learn more about GlassFish, see the GlassFish Community page.
I found GlassFish Day pretty interesting in terms of its content and also because of some unexpected "happenings." I'll say a little about the happenings at the end of this blog. I'll also say very little about the technical content. What, you were expecting a blog about GlassFish Day to actually cover the content of GlassFish Day? Well I'm not going to do that because most, if not all, of what was covered today is also covered elsewhere. And the slides for the presentations will soon appear in The Aquarium. I'm also quite sure that my friend Arun Gupta will cover the sessions in his insightful blog. What I will offer regarding the technical content are the titles of the presentations, the names of the presenters, and pointers to where you can find information about each presented topic. Let me do that now:
| Session Title | Speaker | Find information at |
|---|---|---|
| Update on GlassFish v2 and v3 | Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine | GlassFish v2 - Enterprise Features And Open Source |
| Open ESB + Imola | Sang Shin and Raffaele Spazzoli | Open ESB project |
| OpenMQ | Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine | GlassFish and OpenMQ |
| JAX-RS & Jersey | Jakub Podlesak | jersey: RESTful web services made easy in Java |
| Metro Web Services | Arun Gupta | Announcing Metro - Naming the Web Services stack in GlassFish |
Now that I've dispensed with that little bit of information, here's what this blog really has to offer: audience feedback. Yes, something that's rarely seen in a blog designed to cover a set of presentations. During most of the breaks between the sessions, I brought my hand-held tape recorder to the break area and asked one or more of the attendees some questions regarding the sessions and the content. If I were a little more savvy and a little quicker I'd have the recorded audio available for you to play directly from this blog. But I'm not savvy and quick enough to get that done now. So I'm offering a transcript of what I heard. So here goes ...
First interview -- After the session "Update on GlassFish v2 and v3"
Ed: So first of all what are your names?
All: I'm Dario. I'm Milo. I'm Allesio.
Ed: Do you all work for the same company or different companies?
Dario: Yes, the same company.
Ed: Which company?
Dario: Reply.
Ed: Do you use GlassFish now?
Dario: Not now. We use Tomcat and Axis. We're here just to know about GlassFish.
Ed: So what sort of applications do you currently deploy?
Dario: A rather complex application about access monitoring, certification, and replicability.
Ed: Authentication, authorization, that sort of thing. Is there anything in this session that Alexey gave that particularly interested you?
Dario: Mostly the integration -- several features that GlassFish offers on security.
Ed: Is there anything that you expect to see in this app server that was not presented here?
Dario: Not really. Because we come to first know about GlassFish. So we're first learning about it.
Ed: So is it your intention to try it out?
Dario: Not for the development phase of a big project. We'll think about it for future projects.
Milo: There are some interesting features we will consider when we will develop our next version.
Ed: O.K., and again it's mostly the clustering, the security?
Milo: Especially the security part because we are now working with Rampart and Axis for security. Rather complex. Hopefully, from the short demo we saw, it seems to be quite streamlined. So it will be interesting.
Ed: Very good. Thank you very much.
Second interview -- After the session "OpenPortal project"
Ed: Why don't you first tell me your name?
Roberto: Roberto.
Ed: And if you don't mind what company you work for?
Roberto: I work for an Italian ecology company.
Ed: And what do you do for them?
Roberto: I do development and analysis for enterprise applications for public administration.
Ed: So do you use GlassFish?
Roberto: No.
Ed: You don't. So you're coming here more in terms of interest?
Roberto: Yes. To study it and I think that I will study in the next day when I come back to my company and then maybe I will propose to management to use it.
Ed: So what do you use now?
Roberto: We're using WebLogic for the big enterprise deployments and JBoss for medium applications.
Ed: Is there anything that you've seen so far in the GlassFish and the Portal presentations that you found particularly interesting?
Roberto: I have not much experience with portals, so I don't have any strong reactions to that. But I was impressed with the speed of GlassFish.
Ed: So the clustering?
Roberto: Yes and the Administration Console. I think it's quite impressive.
Ed: One thing ... I don't know if you'e aware of it -- I don't think Alexis mentioned it -- but the Admin Console now uses Ajax, so it's a very dynamic interface. It uses Ajax-enabled JavaServer Faces components.
Roberto: No I did not realize this.
Ed: Is there anything that you would like to see in a tool like this that you have not seen in the demonstration or presentation?
Roberto: No.
Ed: It's a little too early -- you need to study it?
Roberto: Yes, yes.
Ed: O.K. great. Thank you.
Third interview -- After the session "OpenMQ project"
Ed: First of all, if you don't mind, what are your names?
All: My name is Francesco. And I'm Maria.
Ed: And where do you work?
Francesco and Maria: Italtel, an Italian company.
Ed: And what roles do you have, what job responsibilities?
Francesco: Software developers and architects, both.
Ed: And do you use GlassFish?
Francesco: No, not at the moment.
Ed: So you're interested in just investigating it?
Francesco: Sure.
Ed: What do you use right now?
Francesco: Tomcat.
Maria: Apache Tomcat.
Ed: So is there anything that you heard in the sessions today on GlassFish and the open source projects that you found particularly interesting?
Francesco: Yes, from my point of view the most interesting thing is the clustering feature. That's GlassFish.
Ed: For performance reasons, for availability?
Francesco: Failover reasons.
Maria: Load balancing.
Ed: O.K. So what sort of applications would you be deploying on GlassFish?
Francesco and Maria: The portal.
Ed: Portal?
Francesco: Yes, we have a portal and with this portal we are developing our web applications specific to service domains. Our point of entering the system is the portal.
Ed: So was that session on the Open Portal project of interest to you at all?
Francesco: Yes, it was interesting as well. But I would be more happy to have more detail. It was too high level for me to go further with this, but it was interesting.
Ed: So that actually leads to the last question. Is there anything that you would have liked to have heard or seen that hasn't been discussed so far? Like a feature in GlassFish or the Portal Server that you expected to see that you haven't heard about yet?
Francesco: Yes, actually I would like to have a more general presentation on the architecture.
Ed: On GlassFish?
Francesco: On the Portal. It would be interesting to have a comparison between what we're using at the moment, which is an open-source portal, Jetspeed, and the features of the Open Portal.
Ed: Thank you.
The bells are ringing
As far as those "happenings," throughout the day and throughout the hotel there were a series of maddening beeps and flashes from the "allarme incendio" -- that's the fire alarm for us non-Italian speakers. It's got to be really tough to do a presentation while these alarms are going off. I admire all the presenters for managing to do their talks despite these annoyances. Alexis, whose welcome talk was the first to be interrupted this way, turned it into a bit of comic relief. After hearing the alarm, he turned and walked to the window, claiming to see how high off the ground he was in case he had to jump out. That drew a laugh from the audience.
All in all, this was a good day. Not exactly knock-your-socks-off compelling, but rather interesting and educational. In other words, more interessante than incendio.