The Aquarium is now being linked from many places and there has been a substantial increase in visitor traffic. This entry is a brief guide to The Aquarium. Some of the visitors may not be familiar with the blog machinery; if so, the next paragraphs provide the basics. Those visitors familiar with blogs may want to jump directly to the details specific to The Aquarium.

A Blog (or weblog) is a website that is a journal of entries that are posted through time. That "log over time" aspect is reflected in many places, for example all entries have a publication time and almost all blogs have a calendar that shows which dates have entries and allows the visitor to navigate through time.

The content of a blog varies widely; its perspective may be political, personal, topical, or any of many others. Most blogs have a single author, but it is not uncommon for an individual to have more than one blog. Some blogs are authored by a group that shares responsibility for the entries.

The entries in a blog create one or more streams of events; the events are described in one of several XML-based formats (several versions of RSS 1.0 or Atom) transported over HTTP. The existance of these streams allows the creation of readers, aggregators, and many other tools.

It is not possible to summarize all the aspects of Blogs, other longer descriptions include the Wikipedia and many others, like here, here and here.

The Aquarium is a group blog authored by several editors; the editors have their own blogs (Carla, Eduardo and Rich) and we share writing the entries in The Aquarium. The Aquarium collects news from the GlassFish Community on multiple topics. The list of topics is growing but it currently includes Open Source, Application Servers, Java EE 5, J2EE, Web Services, XML, Java WSDP, AJAX, Databases and Blueprints. The Aquarium is not intended to be comprehensive, but we try to highlight the most interesting activity we find. You can always give us tips at theaquarium at sun dot com

Like most blogs, The Aquarium is intended for repeat visitors. The content changes continuously and at any given time only the most recent blogs are shown in the front page. You can navigate to some date in the past using the calendar page: click on the date, or use the arrows to move to another month. We are averaging between 3 and 5 entries per day, which quickly builds up volume; the search buttom in the right side bar provides search within the blog; unfortunately this is broken right now, please bear with us while we track the problem. The right side bar also provides quick links into some popular entries.

Entries in The Aquarium are assigned to a category; each category provides an RSS feed. The Aquarium is using Roller 2.0, which supports group blogging but does not yet support tags; this means a given entry cannot be in more than two categories. We are manually tagging the entries and will transition to real tag support when it shows up in Roller.

Most entries in The Aquarium provide highlights and comments on other sources; a few (like this one) are original to this blog. We are tracking blogs as well as forums and mailing lists.

The editors of The Aquarium are Sun employees, in part because we are using Blogs.Sun.Com and in part just because we knew each other. That may change in the future, but in the meantime we are trying to address the interests of the wider GlassFish community. GlassFish already has a number of non-Sun contributors, most prominently Oracle's contribution to Java Persistence, and we are actively trying to report on interesting news regardless of source.

We hope you will find The Aquarium useful. You can always reach us with tips and suggestions at theaquarium at sun dot com.

Update - Check the original launch announcement and a brief recap of the first month.