A new Eclipse proposal (Eclipse Development Process: Pre-Proposal and Proposal) has just been posted at Eclipse.org.

Quoting from the proposal, the scope of the Gemini project is two-fold: • Integration of existing Java enterprise technologies into module-based platforms; and • Implementation of enterprise specifications for module-based platforms The initial emphasis is on standards developed by the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. Gemini is organized under 6 subprojects, each seeded with contributions from SpringSource or Oracle and the overall lead for the project is Mike Keith. The project mentors are Wayne Beaton, Doug Clarke and Adrian Colyer.

A summary of today's news of interest to our communities. Today is Nov 19th, 2009. One more day to go at Devoxx, some Terracotta news and more GlassFish Events. The Java EE 6 specs are in voting right now, and we are still awaiting Godot. Note - this is an experiment to flush out the daily news that otherwise we can't cover due to limited time. Let us know how the format works for you.

Terracotta News

Bumped into Alex Miller's blog and it has several posts worth mentioning:

• Terracotta Acquires Quartz
• Terracotta, Ehcache, Hibernate, and more to come
• Terracotta Use Cases

Devoxx Updates

• Closures coming to JDK 7 - Samples from Cay;reactions from AlexM and StephenC.
• JDK 7 schedule extended til Sept 2010.
• Jigsaw downloads available
  • And, from last week see JDK 7 M5 and companion NB 6.8
• Hudson, the most used CI Solution at Devoxx (@rob2)
• Photos (from Picassa Album)- Happy faces: Roberto; Antonio and AlexisMP - one, two; Ludo.
• Danny's summaries on Day 1 and Day 2. Many, many tweets at #devoxx.

New GlassFish Events

• Added JSF Summit, Sao Paolo Tech Days and JSF Days 2010 to the GF Event Calendar.

Calling all GlassFish-related events!

We maintain a master calendar for events related to all the projects in GlassFish Portfolio at Google Calendar; if you are hosting such an event, or presenting at one, please let us know to theaquarium at sun dot com.

The calendar ID is 3722ulvfgor2qabrut1mkia5m0@group.calendar.google.com, and you can access it in a number of modes: • RSS Feed • iCal Format • HTML

Migration time! OpenSolaris, NetBeans and Hudson have moved (part of) their infrastructure.

The OpenSolaris Website Community migrated opensolaris.org from an ad-hoc web app to XWiki on October 26th, 2009 completing phase 2 of the OpenSolaris.org transition. Check the Transition FAQ for more details. This move had been in the planning for a long time and is still unfolding. The NetBeans site moved the week of Nov 2dn to a new site, see the Announcement and the FAQ. The new NB site uses the Kenai infrastructure but is its own instance, separate from that of Kenai.org. I believe this move has completed.

The last (ongoing) move is for Hudson. Most of Hudson was at Java.Net but some parts were not - like the confluence-based wiki. After the availability problems from a couple of months ago, Kohsuke and the community decided to move the bulk to Kenai. That move is still ongoing but some key sections, like the front-page, have already moved.

In all cases, these moves are intended to be (mostly) transparent to the users (hopefully with improved QoS).

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.