I've added a couple of new twists to the coverage of GlassFish News at TheAquarium to do a better job while controlling our time investment:

• I've started posting short news posts to my twitter feed as I encounter them;    also tweeting are Frank, Giuseppe, Andi, Binod and AlexisMP. • Nobody is tweeting at TheAquarium, but...    if you want to follow the tweets from the editors, use @theaquarium/editors. • We will continue doing the usual spotlights posts as time permits, • I'll do a weekly summary of news uncovered in the spotlights,

I've also started using ScribeFire to reduce the cost of creating posts, but this should be transparent to the readers.

Reporting on news is a losing battle, but I'm hoping that this approach will keep TheAquarium the best source for news on the (larger) GlassFish community while giving the editors a bit more "free" time to invest in other tasks.

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).

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.

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).

IntelliJ IDEA is now available in two editions. The Community Edition (JavaSE-focused) is now Available under OpenSource at JetBrains.org, while the Ultimate Edition is JavaEE-focused (Supports GlassFish) remains for-fee. See this detailed comparison chart.

Too many variables going on right now to guess how important this development will be for IDEs, but competition is (almost always) better for consumers.

The Executive Committee for SE/EE of the JCP has approved JSR 330, Dependency Injection for Java. This specification, led by Bob Lee @ Google and Rod Johnson @ SpringSource was submitted in May 09 and moved through the JCP process very quickly. The final vote result was 14-1-1. Congratulations to the leads and the EG on this important spec. There are still a few specs left to approve that will go into the umbrella JavaEE 6 JSR. The next major one is probably JSR 299, which was submitted ahead of 330 but was later restructured to leverage it.

The first 4 recordings of the keynotes from Oracle OpenWorld are now available. The recordings are very well done: they are available for download in multiple formats (flash video/audio, mp4, mp3, ppt, txt) and the web viewer synchronizes video, audio, slides and transcript; nice! One of the recordings is of Scott's Keynote. He did a bit of a retrospective on Sun, including some early days clips and a couple of top 10's. Scott's biggest applause was for his "proudest innovation":

"Kicked Butt, Had Fun, Didn't Cheat, Loved Our Customers, Changed Computing Forever"

The rest of Scott's keynote included a short visit by James and a longer one by John where he talked about the latest, benchmark-leading, flash-based, Sun systems. Larry closed the session, using the new systems to tease IBM on multiple fronts.

Scott's keynote was on Sunday; Larry's just finished a few minutes ago (Wednesday).

Larry's recording should be available "soon"; when it does, you may want to do a skim through the slides/transcript and slow down to video for those sections on which you are most interested. He covered four topics: an update on Oracle Enterprise Linux adoption, Exadata/Hardware, new Support Offering that combines MyOracle and their Enterprise Manager (quite similar in spirit to Sun's efforts), and an overview of the new Fusion Apps. He mentioned the cloud multiple times! Ah, and our Governator came for a quick visit!

The section on Fusion Apps was very interesting - I think Larry does a very good job to show the value prop (to the customers!) of the newly rewritten Apps. I had not really understood what the rewritten Apps really meant to Oracle and their customers. For example, he emphasized several times that Business Intelligence is built-in into the Apps, and that the UI is driven from there.

That's it for me on OOW. I spent about a day and a half at OpenWorld and Oracle Develop and I enjoyed the experience - although Very Different to JavaOne! You can get a feel for the content and experience from the web posts - posts at Blogs.Sun.Com, Blogs.Oracle.Com, Twitter posts and Flickr images.

Added - Also see this Flickr set of Fusion Apps screenshots.
Added - Additional keynotes now available: Thomas Kurian.
Added - Direct link to Scott's Higlights Video.
Added - Link to Ted Farrell's @ OTN (uses livestream, which broadcasts "channels", not a plain recording; I think that link will start the channel into your client from the beginning of the clip, but not 100% sure).

Oracle OpenWorld started today. Family commitments didn't let me go there today (do check OpenWorld Live) but I'm planning to be there Mon-Wed. I just tried to capture a few of the events I want to attend and it is as bad as JavaOne - actually, OOW seems worse, but I'm just sampling it, while I try to be exhaustive with J1.

I created a Mini-Calendar to help me track what I want to attend (ha!); you are welcome to check it but beware I've not had time to double check it yet and I need to add events also.

Anyhow, here is a last batch of links on the event:

Jim Parkinson's team has delivered the newest version (7) of Sun Communication Suite. This solution provides Mail, Messaging, Calendar, Address book and others and is intended for large deployments, being very scalable and currently supporting hundreds of millions of mailboxes in many ISPs.

I've never worked in the Comms team but I've worked with Jim several times over the years, and, as you can see, he is very proud of this release, more than a year after Releasing Suite 6. The highlights of the new version are the revamp of the to leverage AJAX, and the support of the latest standards, iCAL/CalDAV, in the Calendar Server.

The Comms team has been aggressively using wikis.sun.com to produce their documentation quickly and efficiently; check out How to use the Wiki to Find what you are looking for. In addition, the team has written a number of posts around the release of Comms 7; check out:

• Brief or Very Detailed Overview of the Suite.
• iCal Support in Sun Calendar Server 7.
• Brief Installation Sketch
• Detailed Reflections by Jim on the last year.

Congratulations to the team for this release!

I've never been at Oracle OpenWorld so I'm very curious about how it feels. In preparation, yesterday I poked around a bit and found several videos that may (or not, we will see) convey a bit the mood... check them out and let me know what you think. If you only have time for one, I recommend the last one.

• Keynote Preview Series: Applications, Virtualization, DataBases, Middleware. • Overdressed at OOW Series: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6]. • OOW 08 Party - they take over Howard Street, like the good J1 days! • More virtalization and cloud previews: Alex A and Rich Schwerin. • And last, but not least, Every Build You Break.

The main blog for OpenWorld is Oracle OpenWorld and there will be live streamcasting of multiple events at OpenWorld Live.

I recently bought my first smartphone and I chose a BlackBerry Tour because it has a keyboard and I wanted to keep up w/ my kid's SMS typing... The latest goodie for the BB is the BB Messenger 5.0 which can generate and scan PINs encoded as QR Codes. Turns out these codes seem to be extremely popular in some markets and may catch up in the others... Soo, I generated codes for GlassFish.org (QR Code) and TheAquarium (QR Code). And, if you want to generate QR Codes, I found i-nigma useful.

The 2009 JCP Elections are here. The JCP has been trying to improve transparency with the new JSR 215 rules (JCP 2.7 MR); now it is your turn. Between now and Oct 14th you can nominate names for the two open seats (Java SE/EE and Java ME) here. Then, from Nov 20th til Oct 2nd, you can vote on the seats.

Check out the Call for votes and the Election Overview.

As we reported yesterday, Java.Net is under a DDOS attack (seems somewhat similar to this one). The Sun and CollabNet teams are working hard to address this but it's taking longer than we all want, so here are a few useful links that apply to GlassFish and Hudson.

First, because the services used by our projects come from multiple infrastructures, some sites have not been affected (knock on wood - or toca ferro). The following seem to be unaffected: • wikis.glassfish.org, wiki.hudson-ci.org/, maps.glassfish.org/server • Downloads at download.java.net including:    GF v3, including GF v3 nightly and GF v3 promoted,    GF v2, including GF v2.1 and GF v2.1 nightly,    GF v2.1.1, including GF v2.1.1 promoted and GF v2.1.1 nightly,    Eclipse Bundle; also see more d/ls at GlassFish. • Downloads of NetBeans and Hudson • Kohsuke also created SVN mirrors at svn-mirror.glassfish.org including:    hudson, glassfish-scripting, glassfish grizzly, hk2 jersey.

For the case of Hudson, there is a run-time impact due to the plugin-store which has been addressed in the latest build, but see Dealing with Outages, and also see this discussion of longer-term solutions.

I'll add more useful links as I find them / people report them to me. Thanks for your patience while we deal with this situation.

I have mixed feelings about the current arrangement of Twitter widgets at TheAquarium. I like that they help me track conversations and discover news and opinions but the widget takes some time to load and too often the content is blank - I assume infrastructure problems, which they now have money to fix. A reader recently complained about the widgets and I promised to collect feedback via a survey. So, if you care about the widgets, one way or the other, please go fill in this 3-question Survey...