The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse is our all-in-one bundle that includes the Eclipse IDE (wiki) - the main alternative to that other IDE - the GlassFish Server and the GlassFish Plugin (home, intro), all in a single download. The GlassFish Plugin is updated quite frequently but, fortunately, it is quite easy to update the plugin from the bundle so you don't have to do a full-reinstall. The latest versions of the plugins are 1.0.32 (9/4/09) and 1.0.33 (9/11/09) - that's just a week apart - and a full list of changes is always available through the Release Notes.

Although WTP's support for Java EE 6 has been Delayed until mid-2010 the GlassFish plugin provides critical Java EE 6 wizards - see Arun's latest entry in his TOTD series: Java EE 6 (Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1) wizards in Eclipse - and additional wizards are planned by GlassFish v3 FCS.

These plugins can be installed on Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede and Eclipse 3.5 Galileo. Galileo seems to have a nice set of features (Wiki, blogathon, DZone) and a co-bundle of Eclipse 3.5.1, GlassFish v3 and the latest plugins will be available when GlassFish v3 ships.

Improving the clustering and high availability has been the focus of SailFin V2. Now, a new 3PCC (Third party call control) converged sample application demonstrating the session failover feature of sailfin has been integrated. The 3PCC sample has been written to follow the guidelines from RFC 3725. The sample has been bundled with nightly builds, from today. Take a look at Bhavani's bogs here for details.

As we get closer to GlassFish v3 FCS, the development is moving into cleanup stage - and with high volume, see the DEV alias. Part of the cleanup is the usual bug fixing, part is an Increased Testing via FishCAT and part is general code quality cleanup via tools like FindBugs. FindBugs is particularly useful because it helps to find new bugs and prevents future bugs. FindBugs is integrated into the development cycle through a Hudson job; see High Priority FindBugs. The FindBugs cleanup phase started recently (see FindBugs thread), but the Trend Chart shows the progress.

Oracle OpenWorld is October 11th to 15th, at San Francisco's Moscone Center (Bird's eye). We currently have scheduled two informal presentations during their Unconference: • Creating Quick and Powerful Web applications with Oracle, GlassFish and NetBeans/Eclipse   Mon, Oct 12, 11am PT - Overlook I • Hudson community meet up   Tue, Oct 13, 9am PT - Overlook I

Times, dates, content and sessions are not yet finalized and subject to change; we will try to keep you up-to-date here and in the GlassFish Conferences Wiki Page. Official information is at the OpenWorld pages: Agenda, Catalog and Main Wiki.

See our GlassFish Events Calendar for this and other events.

Arun will give a Webinar on deploying Rails Applications to GlassFish next Wednesday. Details at the Registration Page and at Arun's post; the summary is: Topic: Deploy Your Rails Apps on GlassFish Webinar Date: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 Time: 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 19.00 CET Duration: 1 hour Speaker: Arun Gupta, GlassFish Evangelist

I've entered this event in the GlassFish Events Calendar. Let us know of any events that are relevant to the GlassFish community so we can capture them there.

Project Shoal is the GMS (Group Management System) technology behind the GlassFish 2.x and Sailfin clustering features but it is also a standalone project which has just shipped version 1.1 (announcement). New features include new health state and client notifications, diagnostics, failure detection and scalability enhancements, as well as an experimental cross subnet support. The list of fixed bugs is pretty long (thanks to the GlassFish and Sailfin teams and to everyone filing issues).

Code (binary and source) and documentation are all available today. Check out Shreedhar's post on this release.

This shoal 1.1 release is already integrated in the upcoming GlassFish v2.1.1 and Sailfin v2 products (both will ship simultaneously). Check out related blog posts tagged with shoal.

I've been enlightened. A while ago - I just checked, it was actually 2006! - I read Cay's Elvis Meets GlassFish and I thought it was a cute reference to The King. Then yesterday I noticed that Byron's Mort Learns Monitoring and Administration Commands and I thought it was about Terri Prachett's Mort... Well, turns out I was wrong and they are about Mort, Elvis and Einstein, which are personas for developer classes that were used at Microsoft (we had our own back in DevPro); check out Wesner Moise's note, Nikhil Kothari's explanation and Jeff Atwood's update...

So, now that I've been educated, check Byron's posts for Mort, the opportunistic developer:

• Mort Learns JDBC
• Mort learns JDBC Realm Authentication,
• Mort learns Monitoring and Administration Commands

PS. Does anybody know where "Mort" comes from? The other two are clear, even to a guy that was not born in the US :-)

So, you are a happy GlassFish user and want to show your appreciation? First option would be to become a customer but if you are in a hurry and/or are short in cash, consider joining the LinkedIn and/or FaceBook groups. Thanks for taking the time.

Oracle has posted an FAQ on the Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server that's worth a check. It's full of interesting bits; the first one that caught my attention was: Q: Can the Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server hardware or software be modified or customized? A: No, customizing or modifying the Sun Exadata Server Hardware or the Oracle Exadata Server Software is not supported. In addition, customers cannot install additional software on the Exadata Storage Servers. If a customer modifies, customizes, or installs additional software on the Exadata Storage Server, then the Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software cannot be supported.

The FishCAT is Back! (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)! Judy has announced the Launch of the FishCAT Program for GlassFish v3, building on the success of the GFv3 Prelude Program (also see the 100 members achievement). We are in the final stretch for GFv3 (roadmap); if you are interested in helping with the quality of this critical release for GlassFish, check Judy's Post, and the FishCAT home and Wiki pages and contact Judy through the Quality Alias.

We have published a new WhitePaper on Hudson: Developing Software Collaboratively with Hudson, like the rest of the GlassFish Portfolio WPs it requires (free) SDN registration. The WP provides a good overview of Hudson and Sun's commercial distribution: Sun CI Server (summary), which is part of the GlassFish Portfolio. Check it out and let us know what you think. And, on a separate but related topic, Kohsuke just came back from Presenting at JavaZone and it seems it went very well. The recordings are now available and they look very good - see the Full List, the encodings in Silverlight and MP4.

Go to the front page of Sun.com and Follow the link for an invitation to this Event on Tuesday. You're Invited to See the World's First OLTP Database Machine With FlashFire Technology Hosted by Larry Ellison; John Fowler will also attend.

GlassFish v3 is available in a number of download bundles. The bundles are available at different locations: the Community Download Page and the JavaEE Preview SDK, with different installer technologies: ZIP file or an installer and with different feature sets: Web or Full Profile. Alexis has written a good summary of the issues involved to help you navigate through these options. Check it out, and continue to get ready for the GF v3 fcs release.

The VirtualBox team has started a new project to create an AJAX-based Web Console for VBox. The project is open source under MIT License; check out the Code and the USER and DEV mailing lists. The team is reporting on the progress via its Blog, recent posts covered the Kickoff, an Overview of Architecture, and the Initial Implementation. The Web Console relies on services in the latest maintenance-release of VirtualBox: VBox 3.0.6 (ChangeLog, Download, Download). Our best wishes to the new project; we will track its evolution here.

OpenDS continues to move forward after the Release of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition this last July. As indicated in the Roadmap the next release is OpenDS 2.2, scheduled for this Fall. The Roadmap describes a number of features, including Fractional Replication and LDAP Accessible ChangeLog, but Ludo has just published two features in the Control Panel, the ability to Manage Multiple Servers and Support for Recurrent Tasks.

Added - See Ludo's latest post on the Availability of OpenDS 2.1 build-1; and check out his explanation of the OpenDS Release Numbering System.