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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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Feb
9
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Well, it looks like the rumours we're true - JBoss founder Marc Fleury won't be returning to RedHat (after his paternity leave). It will be interesting to see what he does next; it will also be interesting to see if the JBoss team holds together.
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Jan
5
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I came across two articles this morning while catching up with the holiday news backlog; both related to the middleware market and acquisitions. First - the first speculative report of 2007 that someone is going to buy BEA - these stories popup every 3-4 months, alternating between Oracle and HP (as suitors) - this time it's HP's turn. The second story is that Fleury isn't happy at RedHat and he's been quoted saying some rather negative, personal things about his new employer. Some of what he said in his eweek interview would look just fine in an exit speech. It would be a real shame if JBoss sank without a trace - they really shook up the middlware industry and had some fine technology.
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Dec
11
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BEA have just pre-announced JRockit Liquid VM - a Java VM that only requires VMWare (not anadditional OS). I'm not sure yet what this really means - but it is interesting. If Firefox didn't barf on BEA's web-site I could probably find out more.
What this means is that JRockit can run directly on the VMWare Hypervisor (vs. running in an OS that's running on the Hypervisor) - so you can imagine there's some resource saving. However, it also means you have a dependency on VMWare which is popular but not quite as popular say as Windows, Solaris or Linux. I also guess it means that those 'instances' running only the Hypervisor are no longer general purposes computers - ie. you can't run shell scripts or other applications and tools (unless they are developed to also work with the hypervisor). I would have thought that lighter-weight Solaris Zones (Containers) could deliver the same utilization gains without making the same compromises.
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Nov
21
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By way of David Lee Todd, I just had a quick look at F3 - I can't really comment too much on the language but check out the results - certainly as nice as any Flash Applet I've seen. It'll be interesting to see what kind of tooling would be supported by F3. Pretty impressive.
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Nov
13
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What Sun announced this morning should dispel any rumors about Sun's lack of commitment to Open Source. Anyone still claiming that our open source strategy is just a marketing stunt or a way to offload old IP might find it easier trying to support another myth.
The image is the Hereford Mappa-Mundi from the 12th Century which used a flat projection despite growing evidence to the contrary.
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Dec
2
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Now some of the dust has settled regarding Sun's announcement yesterday - I can respond to some of the opinions forming in the press.
First let me turn to the Register article by Gavin Clarke. Clearly Gavin is hard of listening because he didn't fully get what was announced yesterday. Gavin, here's another way to look at it - yesterday we announced that we're changing the evaluation license of the Java Enterprise System - it used to be a (completely unenforced) 90 day evaluation we've now changed that from 90 days to infinity and we don't care if your evaluation runs into production and becomes the underlying infrastructure to power your business. Go for it. The rest is business as usual - if you want to go into production and you want the kind of world-wide, business critical support you would expect from a company like Sun, and you want us to fix the bugs that YOU think are important and you want us to indemnify you then it's business as usual - you have to become a customer - you have to buy the Java Enterprise System (or Suites).
Here's another way to think about it. With our US$150 / employee / year - which includes products, support, training and consulting credits we never really told anyone how that breaks down - we don't provide an itemized bill. So yesterday's announcement changed nothing for many - most customers will continue to pay the subscription - the ability to deploy for free is unlikely to be that attractive for many customers, though I grant there may be a few. Losing a few revenue customers will be dramatically offset by the increase in volume that this announcement will drive.
Let me address some of the other clap-trap Gavin peddles as news :
"Despite the decision to "give away" its rather poorly architected application server two years ago, for example, Sun's market share has declined. It has also declined despite a crafty rebranding exercise that turned Sun's application server into the reference implementation for all Java application servers."
I know nothing about Gavin but I'm guessing he knows nothing (or very little) about Application Servers and I'm guessing he wouldn't know a "poorly architected application server" from a female African Elephant. I'd be happy (delighted) to help Gavin understand about Application Servers and specifically how great Sun's current product is. This isn't rhetoric - Gavin - I'm available anytime you want to do some more in depth research - just get in touch.
Lori McVittie (of Network Computing) really does know about Application Servers (among other stuff) and here's what she said about Sun's Application Server (in June this year) :
"Now supporting J2EE 1.4, Sun's new app server strongly competes with IBM's WebSphere on features--and beats it on price."
Note, Lori didn't just dream this up - she spent to days in the lab playing with the product (as she has others) - that's what I call research.
OK, last point - Gavin talks about Market share - I don't know where he gets his numbers from (maybe he just asked Marc Fleury) he doesn't say - I have many other data points that show we have a significant share of the developer and production market - and it is a bit more realistic than IDC's revenue-based share studies (or JBoss's heresay).
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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
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Dec
7
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As of yesterday, you now have the chance to get involved and contribute content to the J2EE SDK java.net project - if you want your J2EE based tool, plugin, extension etc. to be seen and potentially used by literally millions of J2EE developers join and contribute today.
This project will be worth watching.
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Sep
22
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We've been busy in the app server group getting the bugs down and quality up so we can release our beta for field testing - this is the first beta release of an enterprise capable J2EE 1.4 platform product.
Meanwhile I have been playing with J2SE 5.0 & the App Server together - the combination is great - I'll blog some details when I get more time.
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Aug
11
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Clusters, Configs and Node Agents
I found myself with some spare cycles this week so I have been delving into the admin console of the next revision of the Sun Java System Application Server – 2004Q4 (or 8.1 as we call it internally). Today I'm going to write a little about clusters, configurations and node agents – the fundamental concepts necessary to understand the administration model. I'm doing all of this via the admin GUI, not because I can't deal with command lines but because I hope the screens will be self explanatory; I also believe in this case the GUI really does add some value – ie. it really does make some operations much, much easier. Though some of the steps here seem trivial – there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Of course everything I do in the following steps via the GUI I could just as well script / automate via the command line interface (or even the JMX API) – but that is the subject of a future blog.
Task Oriented GUI
If you don't want to go rummaging around the admin console (or aren't familiar with it) there is list of common tasks on the initial screen of the admin console – so you have a more natural entry point for the uninitiated – ie. What do I want to do; not what do I want to do it to.
Create a Cluster
I'm going to create a new cluster, click, ...
I simply give the cluster a name, select a config. (or create a new copy of the default config), add some instances c1-i1 and c1-i2, for each select a node agent (essentially selects the machine the instances will run on). Each machine in the domain will have a node agent – it is basically the local proxy for administration purposes. That's it, I'm done. Though I should note that this is not a 'HA' cluster – ie. I haven't installed or configured HADB – it is essentially a cluster supporting service continuity rather than full session continuity and seamless failover (these terms I will describe in another blog)
I now have a new cluster with 2 instances and a new config. Let's take a closer look at the config (which I can access from anywhere it is referenced or use the navigation tree on the left):
What is a configuration ?
Basically a config is a template used for the configuration of one or more standalone server instances, clustered instances or clusters. Though instances within a cluster would typically be homogeneous; strict enforcement of that would be way too inflexible so we allow the configuration (template) to be parameterized – the screen above shows those parameters. For example, in my case, I'm running everything on the same machine so if strict homogeneity were enforced I would end up with port clashes (as I'm running 5 server instances) – out of the box the wizard knows to parameterize all the port numbers; if I click “Instance Values” I can see the properties (and edit the values) :
So now I have my cluster I need to do something with it (ie. deploy and configure an application) – unfortunately that will have to wait ...
Note : this blog entry refers to a future product therefore the usual caveats apply - everything could change significantly between now and when it is released.
