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Sep
18
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David's canned history of App Servers at Sun prompted me to fill in some of the gaps.
There are a handful of us at Sun who've been around long enough to see the entire history of Sun's App Server product line. I joined in 1999 (as part of the Forte Acquisition). At that time Sun had at least 3 Application Servers.
Over the years - in internal presentations I've tried to capture the full genealogy of the App Server at Sun but I've only really ever done a half-assed job - through this blog entry I hope I've captured it correctly. Once and for all. If I haven't - and you know better leave a comment. The picture is supposed to illustrate the code heritage - again, this is mostly from memory - corrections welcome.
I haven't tried the latest version of GlassFish yet - but I will when time permits. Even though I'm not directly associated with the App Server team anymore - I can't help noticing the attention that GlassFish is getting - it's enjoying a success that all the previous versions never did. The reasons - firstly I think the product has come on leaps and bounds - starting with a new code base in 2004 was pretty painful but it paid off - for example performance has improved significantly with every release since. And open sourcing in 2006 made an enourmous difference - it allowed Sun to connect to people we hadn't been able to before.
Note - the big red crosses indicate end of code line - not official EOL date.
Significant Events (mostly from the Wayback Machine or Wikipedia)
1995 NetDynamics Founded
Kiva Software Founded
1997 Kiva wins PCWeek's Best of Comdex award for "Best Internet Software" (sells Kiva App Server for $35k / CPU)
Netscape Acquires KivaSoft
1998 Sun acquires i-Planet (marketed a Secure Remote Access Product which found it's way into Sun's Portal Server) [more]
Sun acquires NetDynamics
1999 AOL acquires Netscape
J2EE 1.2 SDK Released by Sun
Sun and AOL form the Sun | Netscape Alliance
Sun acquires Forte Software Inc. (cross platform IDE and run-time) [more]
Sun acquires NetBeans (Java IDE) [more]
2001 J2EE 1.3 SDK released by Sun
2002 Sun Netscape Alliance ends, Sun continues to market iPlanet products alone. AOL Continues to market subset of products.
2004 J2EE 1.4 SDK released by Sun
2005 GlassFish project launched (I seem to remember Eduardo favored ZebraFish, Jim got his way though)
2006 J2EE 1.5 SDK released by Sun
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Apr
21
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Weekend blogging is becoming a bit of a habit lately - I'm working on a couple of hush-hush projects that converge around JavaOne so things are getting a little hectic. That by the way was an understatement - the English do that all the time. For example Scott (the Antarctic explorer) would probably have described the deadly conditions at the South Pole (had he found it) as a "tad inclement".
Anyway, a busy week interrupted by a quick trip to LA didn't leave much time for reading blogs; let alone actually writing any - so here I am again at the breakfast table scribbling down a few thoughts. O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo. was last week - I did intend to go along for half a day but never got there - I'm sure there's a whole bunch of news to catch up on.
One bit of news I did see was that Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) is out - I'll either resuscitate an old machine or install Parallels and try it out - It'll be interesting to see to what degree they are closing the gap on Mac OS/X. The real news, however, is that Ubuntu now includes the full Java software stack - including GlassFish, JavaDB, NetBeans and Java SE. A good arrangement all round. That's an understatement by the way.
Read more about that news on the Tom Marble's blog, the Aquarium and on John Clingan's blog. By the way - John has chosen a great time to become the Product Manager (or should that be Community Manager) of GlassFish - things seem to be panning out pretty well. That's another understatement.
Until next weekend !
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Mar
26
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Dec
14
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Scott just announced that GlassFish has yet again pushed the price performance barrier. Interestingly this new submission is the first to use Java 6 SDK. Anyone wondering about the performance or stability for Java 6 should be interested in the results - SPECjAppServer2004 is benchmark for performance but also a pretty good soak test for identifying instabilities.
More on Scott's blog, Jean Francois' Blog and full details at Spec's web site.
GlassFish is leading the way in Industrial Strength Open Source.
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Jan
23
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The Aquarium group blog has been running for about 2 months now and I believe it was one of the first group blogs using Roller. Tim Bray's post on group blogging prompted me to write about some of my experiences with Roller and of group blogs in general; in the hope that others might find it useful. I certainly know from within Sun there seems to be a fair amount of interest in group blogs.
First, let me describe what The Aquarium is about. It's a blog about server-side Java, relaying news about Java EE 5, Web Services, XML, and GlassFish (the Open Source java.net project which includes Java EE 5 and Sun's Java Web Services Stack). We use the blog to highlight some of the cool things that people are doing in the GlassFish community; as well as injecting a bit of our own opinion from time to time. The Aquarium is a "professional blog" - by that I mean it has an important role to play in the community and awareness building for GlassFish - and a fair amount of time and effort has been invested to get it started.
I must admit I shared some of Tim's perception of what blogs are, ie. "... being about an individual voice..." and needed a little bit of pushing from my blog co-editors. I think some of my reluctance was that I knew I'd probably need to give up my personal blog on b.s.c (which I'd been nurturing for about 18 months) due to the pressures of balancing the job Sun actually pays me to do, my family and all the other interests competing for my time. Also, I actually like reading blogs that expose a bit of the bloggers personality from time to time and would argue that it adds some depth and colour. I also like being able to use my personal blog to rant about things that bother me; though I also appreciate that others read technology blogs for the technology alone and find the personal aspect a distraction. I guess we'll find the right balance over time.
One of the obvious benefits of a group blog is that we have the ability to share the load. As I mentioned previously - The Aquarium has a real job to do and that would be a very heavy load for a single person. For the domain we cover on the Aquarium there is never a shortage of news - so volume is pretty high (often four or five postings a day) though I think Carla and myself are running up a bit of a deficit !
Roller's support for GroupsRoller WebLogger is an Open Source, Java blog server used by Sun, IBM and JavaLobby; among others. Roller 2.0 introduced some features specifically for supporting group blogs, these include :
- The ability to invite users to join a blog
- Three levels of permission - Limited (draft but not publish entries), Author (Limited + post and edit entries), Admin (Author + change settings)
- The ability to leave a group blog
There are other features that could be useful - using drafts and timed postings it is possible to create a 'pipeline' - ie. blog entries moving through the workflow - allocated to an editor, various drafts, reviewed, published. Unfortunately for us that isn't completely possible because we all use external blog editors and as far as I can tell most editors don't allow you to edit 'published / draft' posts. That said - the timed posting is pretty useful for spreading the posts through the day or timing to catch specific time-zones.
Also for the 'workflow feature' to be really useful it would also need edit locks to avoid overlapping writes on entries - this isn't something we've really had a problem with (there are only three of us) but would probably be a requirement for a larger group bog intent on using the pipeline more.
The only enhancement requests I have for Roller aren't really specific to group blogs as much as they are a requirement for high volume, busy blogs like The Aquarium. First would be the inclusion of tags - I see a 'category' as limited form of tagging - what you really need is the ability to apply zero or more arbitrary (ie. not previously defined) tags to a posting and be able to quickly search on the available tags.
Managing a Group BlogWe use a couple of wikis - one on java.net; and one internal (for all the secret stuff) to maintain a pipeline of future entries so we can keep track of who's doing what and when. We have a fairly loose process :
- identify something bloggable
- blog it or put it in the pipeline for someone else
- get it reviewed (if needed)
- post it or queue it
Additional note - mail, IM, blogs, wikis, workflow - I think these are essential tools for Enterprise Collaboration - these are the things that will probably combine to become the next generation 'Enterprise Intranet Portal'.
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Jul
21
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The App Server perf. team achieved another world first today - a SPECjAppServer2004 submission using only free software - Sun Java System App. Server PE 8.1, Solaris 10 and MySQL - all running on Sun AMD Opteron boxes. Not only does that deliver some pretty awesome throughput for the price it does it in a compatible and therefore portable way - ie. the configuration passes the very strict J2EE Compatibilty Test Suite.
There's a thread on TSS, submission details on spec.org and more on Tom Daly's blog.
So free isn't really good enough anymore - you have to be free, fast and robust - unless you have all the free time, power, air and rack space you need.
Technorati Tags : Java, OpenSource, JBoss, Glassfish
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Jul
20
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I'm still catching up with some of my JavaOne and July Shutdown backlog - it was a busy couple of weeks for us. During JavaOne we released the latest version of JWSDP (Java Web Services Developer Pack), some of the new features include :
- FAST Infoset - see my previous blog entry.
- JAXP 1.3.1
- XML DSig 1.0
- Service Registry 3.0 (Early Access)- a service registry supporting UDDI and ebXML Reg/Rep
- XML WSS (Web Services Security) 2.0 (Early Access)
- Streaming XML Parser 1.0 (Early Access) - an implementation of StAX (JSR 173)
- Read more ...
The ever popular JWSDP Tutorial has also been updated.
You can download JWSDP here and it obviously supports Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition and other web containers. If you are using the Standard or Enterprise Editions of the Application Server you'll be able to download the fully supported JWSDP 1.6 plugin from the online support center when it is posted.
Technorati Tags : Java, JWSDP, XML
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Jul
15
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Marc Fleury is still continuing his crusade to convince people that GlassFish is irrelevant; but it's no longer a lone vigil, he's now joined by Bill Roth (BEA's VP of Product Marketing). Step back for a moment - 2 very busy people go out of their way talk to an obscure publication about the "irrelevance" of GlassFish - Yeah, right, maybe the combined brainpower will yield greater success. In the same article, there are some strange assertions by both Bill and Marc that GlassFish is not OpenSource - but as Jim Driscoll says in his blog - neither Marc nor Bill have any say as to what is "Open Source" - that is a sole privelage of the OSI. If they are intentionally spreading FUD (as opposed to being clueless) then that's a pretty desperate measure.
Back in the real-world, GlassFish's use of CDDL seems to have kicked off a flurry of debates regarding choice of Open Source licenses and business models - most notably Marc Fleury's comments were vigourously debated on TheServerSide and JavaLobby (another thread here) and the converstation on Jim Driscoll's blog has overflowed to TSS as well.
Of course, as Marc and Bill said this is all completely irrelevant - nothing to see here; move on.
Before wading into any debates about CDDL I heartily recommend reading the excellent blog entries by Simon Phipps and Claire Giordano which cover some of the motivations behind CDDL.
Technorati Tags : Java, OpenSource, JBoss, CDDL, Glassfish
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Jul
6
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I was just reading Andreas Schaefer's entry about GlassFish and though I would respond to some of his concerns.
Though Platform Edition doesn't compete feature-wise with JBoss - for the target market it has most of what it needs; ie. for 90% of the typical JBoss / Tomcat deployments. It also has some features not found in other products - JavaServer Faces, Web Services Security, full J2EE 1.4 IDE - for example.
PE has other advantages over the FREE / OSS competition - it's faster and possibly more robust; it's more appropriate for a broader range of skills (ie. simple installer, easy to use admin GUI console, great docs. and tutorials). It's also fairly well accpeted in the market - most people have at one time or another used the SDK.
In terms of feature parity, I think it would be natural for some features from the commercial products to sediment into the free product over time - specifically a simple HTTP load balancer and some rudimentary multi-machine management - to make it more appropriate for large clusters. [note, these are my thoughts - they are not future plans]
Are we too late with GlassFish ? Well, no-one would disagree that it would have been good to do this a couple of years ago but I don't think that would have changed the landscape much - I think there would still be competition with JBoss and Geronimo. I also don't think that JBoss has the market for OSS cornered - they have been operating in a market segment with little or no competition to date - their mettle will be tested in the coming year.
One thing is for sure - the next couple of years of Server Side Java are going to be fun. I think the pace of innovation (driven by the competition) will only increase and Java will gain more ground. Vendor's will be aggressive in pushing their platforms; with not only free tools but also free run-times - it will be increasingly hard to justify a non Java platform.
Competition is a good thing.
PS. Andreas - welcome to the team - hopefuly we'll have the opportunity to work together in the future - fresh perspectives are all always valued at Sun.
Java, Geronimo, JBoss, Glassfish
