You may or may not know that Comet, Reverse Ajax, and Ajax Push are all synonyms and define a way to notify clients from a server. Jean-François has written many fine Comet blog entries, but this GlassFish v3 documentation on Comet is a very well written intro to the Comet paradigm and how to use it inside GlassFish v3 based on the Hidden example. You may also hear from Jean-François on Comet in a recent interview from this past JavaOne as well as read Ted Goddard's slide deck on IceFaces and Grizzly Comet from last week's GlassFish Day at Jazoon.

The documentation also discusses the pros and cons of HTTP Streaming vs. Long Polling and explains how to code both.

Bindows was one of the first AJAX toolkits and they have just announced Comet support on their BindowsFaces product, a JSF library. Comet is supported through an adaptor interface and Bindows includes one standard adaptor - that for GlassFish Server. See Bindows Blog Entry and Comet Daily for the announcement. For more on BindowsFaces check the How to Use and Documentation Pages. Bindow's parent company, MB Technologies, recently joined the Sun Partner Program for GlassFish and should be in our Partner Showcase very soon.

I was going to wait until late next week, but I see that JFA's interview at InfoQ is out and the website is visible so no reason to wait. JFA's "free time" left by Alexey's lead role on Grizzly 2.0 is going to be reinvested into a Atmosphere a new project in the GlassFish Community that will focus on Comet. The project is just starting; the InfoQ article seems roughly accurate although some goal fine-tuning is still happening. I expect JFA will provide a more detailed description in a future blog entry.

The late sixties and seventies saw an explosion of programming languages but then we went through a consolidation. I am still grateful that Java saved me from C++, but I like the renewed interest in other languages. Languages with following include Ruby('95), Python('91) and Erlang('87) as well as newer additions like Groovy('03) and Scala('03). Paul certainly likes Scala, here is his JavaOne Jersey Demo in Scala.

Many of these languages are using our trusty JVM, now under Open Source. That can simplify development and adoption, so maybe we will have another golden age of Programming Languages!

JSR 311 (JAX-RS, Restful Web Services) has just passed the public review ballot with 12 "Yes" votes and no "Abstain" or "No" votes. Full results are here. Congratulations to the expert group for reaching that stage of the process while managing to generate a lot of interest for the technology!

Meanwhile, Jersey (the JAX-RS reference implementation) is being "Mavenized" with latest snapshots available from the https://maven2-repository.dev.java.net/ repository. Jakub takes advantage of that to build a simple Jersey web app and mvn glassfish:run it in GlassFish v3.

The Review for the Public Draft for JAX-RS ended today, and I guess Jakub is celebrating showing how to build a Simple WebApp Using Maven. Full sources and instructions are included, all the way to starting the app using maven and invoking it using cURL. The WebApp is plain vanilla JAX-RS but you can also use the Stappler-inspired MVC framework (see Paul's excellent note).

I think Jersey will be very successful; we now just need to include it in GF v2, GF v3, and GF ESB :-)

Added: The JCP approved the Public Draft; the vote was 13 YES, zero NO and 3 abstentions, see vote details.

It's always nice to see others combining various technologies to come up with new and interesting applications. In this case, Natiku has described how to run Project WebSynergy onto the Amazon EC2 Computing Cloud. It runs the OpenSolaris OS. This could easily be farmed out to web startups who want to get a site up and running quickly for very low cost, while retaining the ability to pay more for more CPUs/bandwidth later.

Very cool, very cheap, and very easy!

After a bit of a JavaOne hiatus, Jersey lead Paul Sandoz has posted slides and full demo source code. He's also introducing Jersey's support for MVC (inspired by Hudson's stapler) together with support for multiple templating technologies.

Meanwhile, Jakub details an approach to work around cross-domain restriction with Jersey. Sample code is provided.

JAX-RS is now in Public Review Draft (closing June 2nd).

The Object Relational Mapping in Rails is provided  by ActiveRecord. If GlassFish is used for Rails application deployment then you may like to use Java Persistence API, because of existing code, for ORM instead.  Vivek explained in a recent blog how to use JPA with Rails on GlassFish v2 and MySQL. Ming followed up with a similar entry for GlassFish v3.

GlassFish v2 uses Top Link Essentials as persistence provider and GlassFish v3 uses Eclipse Link. Rails powered by the GlassFish Application Server provides all the details on why should consider using GlassFish for deploying Rails applications.

Previous success stories of Rails deployed on GlassFish can be seen here and here.

Using JRuby (instead of Ruby) to develop your Rails applications allow you to leverage the power of Java libraries in Rails applications. Java 2D API is one such API that provides support for advanced 2D graphics and imaging. Jennifer has a good Writeup explaining image-filtering effects (negative, grayscale, brigthen, sharpen) using Java 2D API on an image.

The app runs using GlassFish v3 Gem but can be natively deployed on TP2 as well.

TP2 Docs provide a more comprehensive tutorial on how to get started with using Rails for the GlassFish v3 Application Server.

I'm beginning to think we "undersold" GFv3 TP2 when we called it a Technology Preview as pretty much anything we are throwing at it works! Check out Vivek's latest note on Scala Lift Framework. Starting with a Maven Archetype, it creates a Scala Lift project using a Derby database that can deploy on GFv3 and, with a small change it can use v3 tp2 embedded for ease of development through mvn glassfish:run. Neat!

The latest episode (#12) of the GlassFish Podcast is out. This is an interview from last week with Jean-François "Grizzly" Arcand on Comet (aka AjaxPush).

This 20-minute podcast gets into the Comet paradigm, its availability in GlassFish v2 and v3, standardization in the forthcoming Servlet 3.0 specification, and more.

Note also that Jean-François will be delivering three presentations in Canada later this June (2008): Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto.

Check out this short Screencast for an overview of Project SocialSite, the new GlassFish project that we announced last week. The project decouples the Java-based server side and the client, and, through the OpenSocial API, enables the addition of Social Gadgets to your web site or application. Thanks to Jamey and Dave for the tip.

Sun has joined the Liferay Community to develop a common Web presentation platform that incorporates portal and integration technologies from Liferay and from OpenPortal, GlassFish, OpenSSO and other related projects (Press Release, FAQ@Liferay, FAQ@OpenPortal). The collaboration actually started a while ago and Liferay 5.0 (Download) already includes Portlet 2.0, WSRP and OpenSSO support. Future technologies will include Mirage CMS, SAW and others...

WebSynergy is closely related to the current and future evolution of GlassFish; to formally recognize that, we will formally add OpenPortal to the larger GlassFish community.

An early version of WebSynergy based on Liferay 5.0, GlassFish v3, and MySQL is Now Available (also see screencast).

Several of the key community members have written about WebSynergy; check out:

• Brian @ Liferay - Liferay and Sun
• James @ OpenPortal - Sun/Liferay Initiative
• Prashant - Inter-Widget communication in cross-platform widgets

On Monday, at CommunityOne, Dave gave the first public presentation of SocialSite, a new project designed to add OpenSocial applications to your site, regardless on whether it uses JSP, PHP, or other technologies.

Dave and Jamey will be giving more details on SocialSite on Thursday: BOF-5857: Turn your website into an OpenSocial container with Project SocialSite. 6:30 PM on Thursday at Esplanade 307/310. Also see Dave's note.