Data Deduplication is a big deal, as was shown back in July when EMC spent 2.4B$ to acquire Data Domain. This morning Jeff announced that dedup has been added to ZFS; this has generated quite a bit of buzz in the 'web, although I've yet to see Oracle's stock going up... or Apple changing their mind. Check Jeff's post and comments; it is a nice read. Also read on disk savings at ZFS-Discuss.

Jim Faut and Rick Palkovic have been posting a nice series on how to troubleshoot OpenSSO with Firefox Add-Ons. They just pushed out two more entries in the series, which now includes:

• Part 1: Introduction • Part 2: Single Sign-On and Policy Protection • Part 3: Cross-Domain Single Sign-On • Part 4: Service Provider Initiated Fedlet Single Sign-On • Part 5: Identity Provider Initiated Fedlet SSO Fedlet deployment

These articles are worth a check even if you just want to learn about how OpenSSO works: just follow their diagrams to see the exchange of information between the parties that enable these features.

And, on this topic, you may want to track the participation of the OpenSSO team at next week's Internet Identity WorkShop; see Daniel's note.

And Happy Halloween!

ColdFusion (wikipedia, product) was first released in '95 by Allaire which was later bought by Macromedia in '01 and merged into Adobe in '05. CF was rewritten into Java a while ago, interacts nicely with JavaEE and with Adobe's products and is still quite popular. When we got serious about GlassFish several of us drove down to San Jose to talk with Adobe. Adding a new supported platform is non-trivial for a large vendor; the question is not "does it run?" part but "is it worth setting up my testing and support team?"... which boils down to, "do I see enough traction in my customers?". So, I'm very pleased to point to: ColdFusion 9 supports ... and Sun™ GlassFish. Happy! And Wednesday's news should just help further.

Adding a few other recent GlassFish sightings...

• How to Install JRebel on GlassFish with Eclipse IDE
• JavaMonitor Probe for GlassFish
• Servlet 3.0 support in Maia (IntelliJ IDEA 9) via GlassFish v3
• Installation Guide for JSF+Facelets+RichFaces (Technical BrainWave)

Also, check out: Sun's Technology powers Verizon Developer Community.  We really need to get back to posting adoption stories - there have been quite a number of great ones in the last few months.

GlassFish v2.1.1 is out (Sun Distro, Community Distro). GFv2.1.1 is the foundation for SailFin v2 and includes refinements on Replication and Failure detection plus many (>200) bug fixes and other improvements. See Shreedhar' s Overview, Kevin's post, the Wiki page and PR @Oracle OpenWorld. GFv2.1.1 also includes OpenMQ 4.4, Grizzly 1.0.30 (changes), Jersey 1.0.3 (changes), Shoal 1.1 (changes) and JSF 1.2_13. The bulk of the changes are from the GF repository (changes).

The commercial offering is via the GlassFish Portfolio. Note that GFv2.1.1 is also a patch for earlier releases (GFv2.1, itself a patch for GFv2U2) but the patch has not yet published at SunSolve. I'll post an entry at GlassFishForBusiness when it becomes available.

James reports on the latest news on JavaCard 3.  JavaCard (wikipedia, spec site) is what we all have in our pockets (ATM cards) and/or our phones (SIM cards). The JavaCard 3 comes in two Editions: Classic (for SIM/ATMs) and Connected. The new kid, Connected, supports most of the JDK6 VM as well as Servlet 2.5, extended and classic Applets, HTTP and HTTPS, etc. The target of JavaCard3 Connected includes secure USB tokens and personal DBs, Embedded Servers, WebDAV-Compliant Thumb Drives, etc.

JavaCard Connected seems it may deliver on the promise of "connected" Java devices everywhere; we will see how it gets adopted. There is a new project at Kenai focused on learning about JavaCard Connected. The project includes the NetBeans Plugin (see sneak preview).

Today was the release of SailFin v2 (download, home, wiki) and its companion Sun GlassFish Communications Server 2.0 (download, home). SailFin v2 is a big release; it leverages GlassFish v2.1.1 (more tomorrow) and adds a number of features including high availability, rolling upgrade, flexible network topology, better overload protection, Diameter support, improved diagnosability, Java based DCR files for the load balancer, and more. I can't cover SailFin v2 properly but I'll collect some of the relevant links so you can follow them up.  Start with Binod's overview: SailFin v2 Released! and move from there:

Some of the major changes are:

• A new replica selection algorithm that improves scalability by easing load distribution after failure.
• Enhancements to the Converged Load Balancer to support writing DCR rules in Java.
• The ability to do rolling upgrades leverages session replication; see this example.
• Improved use of multihoming features for more flexible deployments. See Ramesh's writeup.
• Diameter support in Sun's for-fee AddOn; see details in Venu's many posts, including [1] and [2].
• Improved load protection.  See Robert's one pager and Sankar's work on JMX Notification.

As part of the release, the team has posted a number of new entries, including:

• Next is what? (Prasad)
• Subscribing to user state using Sun Diameter Sh API (Venu)
• Setup and Configure Diameter on SailFin (Naman Mehta)
• Diameter Administration on SailFIn 2.0 (Yamini KB)
• SailFin v2 Released (Srikanth Anandal)
• CLB Enhancements in SailFin 2.0 (Kshitiz Saxena)
• Overload Protection in SailFin: What's new in 2.0 (Rampsarathy)
• Tips and Tricks of SailFin HA (Bhavani Shankar)
• Multihoming in SailFin. (Ramesh)

• TA entries tagged SailFin,
• Prasad's earlier roundup: "SailFin 2.0 is Around the Corner!"
• Sreeram's notes on SailFin amazon images.
• How to write Conference App in 15 lines of nicely formatted code!

Finally, a list for PR/Press reports:

• Sun Communications Server Speaks VoIP (The H Open Source)
• Barron's, BusinesWire.

Note - GlassFish v2.1.1 is also available from Sun's Download Center and from the Community Site. More on that release tomorrow. And the OpenMQ 4.4 (and 4.4.1 RC1) are available from here.

The JCP Election Ballot is OPEN. There are ballots for "ratified" and "elected" seats on both the SE/EE and the ME Executive Committes.  These are very important positions - for example, they vote on all the key JSR events. Voting period is until midnight (PT) on Monday, November 2nd. If you are a JCP Member you can go vote through the online Ballot.

The elected seats candidates for JavaEE include Liferay, Matthew McCullough, Tim Peierls and Terracotta.  Ratification candidates are Doug Lea, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Oracle.  More information on the election process at the JCP Elections Page.

Oracle has updated their page on Oracle and Sun and it now includes a PDF entitled "Oracle and Sun Overview and FAQ".  Check it out for comments on many topics covering Sun's Hardware (SPARC, Storage, x86) and Software offerings, including NetBeans, OpenOffice, MySQL, xVM OpsCenter, OpenSource, VirtualBox and GlassFish.

Amazon has just announced the availability of a new service: the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), based on MySQL 5.1 (AWS Blog, RDS@AWS).  They support both InnoDB and MyISAM but not replication.  See notes from: Mark Callahan@Facebook, Robert Treat@OmniTI, CannelWeb... RDS's pricing depends on the size of the DB instance, ranging from 1.7 GB, 1 ECU to 68 GB of memory, 26 ECUs. Also note that EC2 has lowered its prices.

Quoting from the RDS site, this is how Amazon is presenting the value prop:

Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

More AWS info at Products, FAQs and elsewhere at AWS. Overall, this is a good move from Amazon, and the whole space is going to continue to change rapidly in the near future, see for example AWS@Oracle and Oracle@AWS.

The importance of information exchange in Health Care will continue to grow and the Federal Goverment has several projects to improve it, while also trying to reduce costs. And, as Bill wrote earlier in the year, Sun's Open Source has been actively engaged in this.

Added - Just noticed Tim O'Reilly's note on WhiteHouse.GOV's stack. They use MySQL, Drupal and Apache.

The goal of the National Health Information Network (NHIN) is to provide secure, nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure that will connect providers, consumers, and others involved in supporting health and healthcare. And the CONNECT Gateway is intended to let the federal agencies connect to the NHIN. Within the HHS, the ONC is the main entity that coordinates these efforts and it just has choosen Health Information Exchange Open Source (HIEOS) as a key portion of NHIN Connect.

And, HIEOS - developed by Vangent - is using several of our OpenSource components - see Architectural Diagram - including OpenESB and GlassFish, and MySQL.

Apple kills ZFS at MacOS Forge. The effort had shown signs of stress for a while, so the community reaction ([1], [2]) has been to quickly move to a new site; see Dustin's announcement and MacZFS @ Google Code. See reactions on the web at Engadget, AppleInsider, Gizmodo and Macrumors. The Goodbye message was very terse. Given Apple's usual behavior, I doubt we will get any more details than that. Overall reaction is quite muted - the reaction meter at MR was 85+, 400- but the Discussion Thread is quite mild (and technically uninformed).

WADL, the Web Services Description Language, (home@java.net, WADL@TA) is now a W3C Member Submission. WADL is a clean way to describe RESTful Web Services and is supported by Jersey (and thus by GlassFish v3) and other tools like Zembly (announcement, wiki). Congratulations, Marc!

NetBeans 6.8 beta is now available (Download, NB 6.8 Home Page). NB 6.8 has a number of key features, from support for GlassFish v3 to JavaFX to PHP frameworks like symfony. The NB6.8 website links to other documentation that is being updated as we get closer to fcs, including Tutorials and Screencasts. NetBeans screencasts can also be found in the NB Channel at Channel Sun (for example, see the Symfony Support recording; and that of kick butt).

Harpreet has been driving the creation of a Several New WhitePapers for the Sun GlassFish Portfolio. Topics covered include: Hudson, JBoss, WebSpace Server Cloud and many more. A full list is available from the GF Portfolio Resources page. Also see the Sun.Com Resources page for whitepapers and more across all of Sun's products. All whitepapers are free but registration is required.

Mojarra 2.0, the production-quality, reference implementation for JSF 2.0 is out! Yet another step closer to v3 final. This will of course be part of GlassFish v3 later this year (with an integration planned as early as this week) but Maven and standalone are two other options to grab the bits. In his blog, Ryan lists a set of very good resources (mainly blog posts) on JSF 2.0. Earlier this year, Ryan authored a series of blogposts which were also very detailed and informative. He covers tools support (yes, it's coming very soon as Cay discusses for NetBeans in his latest blog post) and recognizes the numerous contributors to this major release.

Note also that while JSF 2.0 is set to be part of Java EE 6, it does not require a servlet 3.0 container. In the case of GlassFish v3.0, web.xml is optional and there is no longer the need to declare the Faces servlet (see Cay's entry on that as well).

Mojarra as an implementation of JSF 2.0 is the first one out but it is also set to be part of a number of coopetitor's. Finally, now is probably a good time to skim throught The Aquarium posts tagged with the jsf2 and mojarra keywords.

Added The latest release is Mojarra 2.0.1, see Jim's post.