Nazrul's Weblog

Introducing GlassFish Update Center

Wednesday May 23, 2007

I have been involved with the GlassFish Update Center project for last few months. Now, I can finally share what I was up to...

Updatecenter (Screencast) is an open source project hosted @ java.net. The initial release with GlassFish V2 is focusing on providing simple download and installation experience of additional applications for GlassFish. If you have used any of the auto updates features in Windows, Mac, Google Updater, Ubuntu or NetBeans; then you would understand GlassFish Update Center easily.

The Update Center functionality in GlassFish is implemented across two tiers. On the server side, we have Update Center modules and corresponding catalog XML file (see DTD). The client side is part of GlassFish V2 installation. When started, Update Center client connects to predefined Update Center server URL. It then downloads available catalog file, compares it to local installed component registry and uses catalog information to show components available for installation or update. Afterwards, based on user's selection, components are downloaded and installed.

Currently, we have the following components integrated with GlassFish V2 UR1:

To try GlassFish Update Center, install GlassFish V2 (screencast, associated blog). Then go to install-root/glassfish/updatecenter/bin and invoke updatetool (or updatetool.bat). Update Center UI will come up. If you don't see anything on the Available Software tab, you may need to set the connection proxy information on the Preferences tab (more details). Refer to the Getting Started Guide for more details.

On the Available Software tab, if you select Java EE BluePrints, Java EE 5 Samples, Java EE 5 Tutorial and Java EE 5 API Documentation and click on Install button, you will be able to convert your GlassFish installation into the Java EE 5 SDK with one click! Refer to this blog by Rajeshwar for detailed steps and post install locations of the installed modules.

Give GlassFish Update Center a try! Let us know about your experience at dev@updatecenter.dev.java.net.

[7] Comments
Like this post? del.icio.us | furl | slashdot | technorati | digg
Posted at 10:03PM May 23, 2007 by nazrul in GlassFish
Tags:
Comments:

Hi imagine that we have a web application deployed into customer machine, can we configure customer server to check for updates about that specific web application? Can it download libraries related to that application or other libraries and copy them into domain1/lib ? Or download the entire web application and redeploy it? thanks

Posted by legolas wood on May 26, 2007 at 10:29 AM PDT #

Great tool. As legolas said, one usage of the tool could be update out applications maybe creating an update center. Another idea is to configure glassfis v3 modules with this tool. Are you thinking on this ideas? I write in spanish about it.

Posted by Enrique Rodriguez Lasterra on May 27, 2007 at 03:15 AM PDT #

We are considering to use update center for GlassFish V3 modules. Current update center has the ability to send updates for an installed module. GlassFish team will be discussing these details in future blogs ([1],[2]). If you have an application that you would like to host on GlassFish Update Center, please feel free to contact us at dev@updatecenter.dev.java.net.

Posted by Nazrul on June 20, 2007 at 11:19 PM PDT #

I could not use NB 6 (milestone 9) to search GlassFish Beta UC (at javaee-updates.java.sun.com/dev_1.18_.xml).

For developer good experience, I think GlassFish update center should be inter operable with NetBeans IDE.

Posted by namnguyen on August 17, 2007 at 09:47 AM PDT #

GOOD

Posted by Rommel Tamayo on October 14, 2007 at 12:41 AM PDT #

very nice

Posted by holcaye on January 12, 2008 at 11:04 AM PST #

الحب

Posted by elshraie on March 13, 2008 at 03:43 PM PDT #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed