Most of the products in GlassFish Porfolio (webinar set) use the latest GlassFish v2.1 but a couple are still using the older GF v2. This is now getting fixed for GlassFish ESB: Mark has announced the first Milestone for GlassFish ESB v2.1. In addition to the new GF Server, the release also includes the IEP SE (Intelligent Event Processor) and the Scheduler BC (see Full list of Components). Go, download it, and let us know how it goes. The photo? Its from Mark's Motorcycle Mania series and it somehow seemed appropriate.

DZone's Masoud Kalali took an interest in project OpenESB and set out to learn more about it. Being Project OpenESB's community lead, he asked me for an interview. In the interview Masoud asked me about the project's history, the relationship with Java CAPS, the competition, scaling, and future plans for OpenESB. The interview is published on the DZone website.

InfoQ published an article on distributed JBI by Derek Frankforth. In this article Derek describes different topologies and describes what topologies are available in project OpenESB. Derek reports that a new topology being developed in OpenESB is heterogeneous clustering based on Project Shoal running in GlassFish. An interesting read! Check it out at InfoQ.

GlassFish ESB, a distribution of the OpenESB project, installs the eight most important components by default. And installing any of the other 37 components is now easier than ever: each component now comes with a dedicated installer. Each component installer comes with both the runtime and the design time bits, and can be launched from the browser, making it a single and easy operation to install a new component.

Check it out on the OpenESB download page!

Kevin Meeks evaluated a number of different Open Source projects for for an enterprise architecture technology stack, one of them being GlassFish ESB. He published his findings in an article on developer.com.

Kevin illustrated his experiences with a short tutorial, guiding the reader from installation to creating and testing a simple composite application. If you're new to GlassFish ESB, this is well worth your time to get acquainted with GlassFish ESB quickly. Kevin looked at what’s available in the OpenESB community, the uptake of the community, the cost model, etc. and liked what he saw. He concludes: There are significant developments underway in the GlassFish project community, and as your SOA/EA efforts may face tighter budget challenges, there is real value to be leveraged by considering the GlassFish Java EE Server and GlassFish ESB project (...). The excellent integration with NetBeans IDE simply adds to the value proposition.

Two new components were introduced in the OpenESB project. They are both JCA Resource Adapters, one for HL7, and one for SAP. This brings the number of components in the OpenESB community to 45. Although both adapters originated in Java CAPS and were released as part of Java CAPS 6, they are in the incubator in OpenESB until they are made part of the automated build process. For more information see the OpenESB home page and the Component Catalog.

Lots of exciting developments in the GlassFish ESB world; hot on the heels of the GlassFish ESB v2 release candidate with its enterprise features and commercial support we're also showing that we have more big plans for the evolution of this platform. With Milestone 3 of Project Fuji we give you the keys to test drive some of the platform enhancements we're working on for GlassFish ESB.next and allow you to be an active participant in driving the direction.

If you haven't been following Project Fuji closely you might be interested to know that there is both an "evolutionary" and "revolutionary" side; Adapters and Containers from v2 also are used in Fuji, and applications built in v2 deploy and run on Fuji. Where we're innovating is in looking at the productivity in every layer; ensuring we are tops in flexibility, agility and ease of use.

Milestone 3 of Project Fuji introduces a (dare I say very cool) web based tooling option for composing services.

Check out the Fuji Milestone 3 Screencast which shows how to use simple drag and drop in a browser to easily build the same scenario that was built in Milestone 2 via the domain specific language "IFL" for composing services.

It's worth noting that the web tooling builds on top of the domain specific language and hence round tripping is easy; you can for example check out the project built in the browser from subversion and edit it in your IDE of choice, just as shown in milestone 2.

This gets us one step closer to the mantra of Fuji: Productivity through flexibility, agility, and ease of use.

• In terms of flexibility this expands your tooling choices
• For agility you might notice the "automatically save and deploy" option which is one step towards our goal of making it very light weight to develop, test and correct your application as you go along
• For ease of use the simple way of visually modeling enterprise integration patterns and simple properties dialogs go a long way

The OpenESB team is getting ready for the first GlassFish ESB realease on Dec 5th, 2008. Mark announced that the first Release Candidate is ready; you could go download it now, but the Release Notes are still empty and I expect more posts early next week. The web site has also improved a lot. Specially important are the improvements to the component page; there are now 43 components and you can search through them by functionality, license, status, type and contributor (thanks to Bill for the tip).

Many of you may have seen the cool things Fuji Milestone 1 did, with its web based tooling option and the simple but powerful way of defining services and linking them together. For Milestone 1 we deliberately chose some contemporary technologies such as RSS and XMPP, which left some folks wondering: how does this apply to the more classic integration scenarios?

Fear not, for Milestone 2 we have chosen a classic scenario and show you how quick and easy it is to solve it with the powerful, but simple to use capabilities in Fuji.

Don't just take our word for it, watch the Fuji Milestone 2 Screencast with Keith driving it. Then Download Milestone 2 and take it for a spin by getting a simple jar file and give us feedback! There actually are more features that we couldn't fit in a single screencast, so watch this space.

For a highlight of the features such as added enterprise integration patterns and interceptors leveraging OSGi capabilities see the Milestone 2 page. Also have a look at Andi's entry on Fuji Milestone 2, which includes further background info.

We also re-vamped the landing page for Fuji, have a look at our fancy schmancy portal page for Fuji https://fuji.dev.java.net, it should have all the links to explore further information, screencasts etc.

Note that tomorrow (October 22, 2008, 9am PT) we'll have a live meeting and webcast to demo and discuss Fuji in the OpenESB Innovation Series meeting, come and participate.

InformIT recently released a two-part interview of Andi Egloff and Keith Babo on Project Fuji and OpenESB. Each part, conducted by Ted Neward, is under 10 minutes and topics covered ranged from value of an ESB and the JBI standard as they are implemented today in OpenESB.

It then gets into how Project Fuji offers to integrate into existing development paradigms and reasons for using OSGi (and how it integrates with JBI). Finally, the discussion focuses on the DSL introduced with project Fuji, a standalone (javacc-based) language to express many powerful integration patterns.

While project Fuji is still a research project, I think it's fair to say that we're hoping that most of the working going on there will become OpenESB 3.0. If you find this interesting, make sure you listen to the monthly OpenESB Innovation Series.

All community members interested in technical discussion of new OpenESB features are invited to participate in the OpenESB Innovation Series meetings. The first installment is this Wednesday (September 24, 2008) at 9am PT and features a presentation on Distributed OpenESB - adding a heterogenous option.

The meeting features presentations and peer reviews where community members present research, innovative new features, projects and prototypes.

These highly interactive peer reviews are complementary to webinars such as the GlassFish technical webinars. See you there!

The OpenESB mailing lists are showing a significant growth in traffic this month. It is just the 17th and the Combined Traffic so far is 1384 (up from 765 for all of August), while the USERS Traffic is 419 (up from 190 for all of August). Quite a bit of the traffic has Sun mailing addresses but most of the questions are actually from people in the field and support that are seeing the interest from customers. It is still too early to claim victory, but the indicators are very good.

BTW, I just poked at the volume on the GlassFish Server aliases; August was the previous record with 6891 posts but this month has already seen 6407 posts!

The first milestone release of GlassFish ESB is now available. It’s a big step for Project OpenESB: GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution of a subset of OpenESB that will be commercially supported by Sun Microsystems.

Commercial support for an open source project is an important step in its evolution: most companies require commercial support before they will deploy an open source project. That is no different for OpenESB.

OpenESB has seen tremendous growth in the past few years, and with Sun’s commercial support in place, OpenESB will be able to go to the next phase of growth.

As an active and healthy open source community there will always be new innovation and components in various stages of their lifecycle, only components that meet the quality critera and testing as well as the systemic qualities required for a production system are worthy of inclusion in the GlassFish ESB distribution. Obviously other components available in the community will still run on this distribution as well.

Check it out at https://open-esb.dev.java.net/glassfishesb/. A getting-started-quickly guide and video are available on that page too, as well as a detailed timeline. The preview form is available now with the final release due in November 2008.

Help us make the product better by trying out the download and giving us feedback on the users mailing list!

We just launched Mural, our Open Source MDM (Master Data Management) project but Forrester's latest Wave Report already says: "Sun Microsystems debuted in the top slot among Strong Performers with solid data deduplication, architecture, and open-source options".

An MDM system allows a single, consolidated, presentation from multiple data sources. Mural brings the experience from JavaCAPS, and adds OpenSource and the benefits of bundling GlassFish Server and MySQL to the mix. I need to write some spotlights on Mural, stay tuned.

Arguably, the best part of the recent OpenESB/JavaCAPS release is not just the bits but also the very capable field engineers that help out customers around the world. One of them, Jason, has an interesting experiment putting Project Wonderland to work to run a virtual distributed workshop. Jason's post explains how this offers a sort of private second-life session with sharing of running applications (with participants being able to take control of them). There's even a short video to give you a feel for the end-user experience.

On a related note, the European JavaCAPS (Horizons) user conference in Munich has now a final date and a fairly stable agenda. Registrations are also open.

Update: Louis has his take on the Wonderland experiment.