I've been enlightened. A while ago - I just checked, it was actually 2006! - I read Cay's Elvis Meets GlassFish and I thought it was a cute reference to The King. Then yesterday I noticed that Byron's Mort Learns Monitoring and Administration Commands and I thought it was about Terri Prachett's Mort... Well, turns out I was wrong and they are about Mort, Elvis and Einstein, which are personas for developer classes that were used at Microsoft (we had our own back in DevPro); check out Wesner Moise's note, Nikhil Kothari's explanation and Jeff Atwood's update...

So, now that I've been educated, check Byron's posts for Mort, the opportunistic developer:

• Mort Learns JDBC
• Mort learns JDBC Realm Authentication,
• Mort learns Monitoring and Administration Commands

PS. Does anybody know where "Mort" comes from? The other two are clear, even to a guy that was not born in the US :-)

This is yet another update on the work going on in GlassFish v3 to provide a REST interface for management and monitoring. This time, Rajeshwar announces the availability of HTML rendering. This makes for a nice and simple interface for navigating through the rich set of monitoring data as well as for reading and modifying the GlassFish configuration, including deploying applications. Previous entries introduce the feature and cover the role played by Jersey.

If you want to try it for yourself, make sure you use a recent GlassFish v3 build (see Rajeshwar's entry or wait for promoted build 60) enable monitoring (set the appropriate sub-system level to LOW or HIGH). Also of interest is Ludo's recent and short presentation from Jazoon which introduces the REST interface feature and shows how to use a JavaFX client to use it (includes a demo too).

For the Mac OS users out there, this does not work in Safari because Safari prefers XML over HTML. So use Firefox instead. Of course you still have the option of using either cURL or wget which I'd argue makes GlassFish quite cloud-friendly (no ssh required).

GlassFish v3 includes all the benefits from its Java EE 6 compliance and its modular, services and OSGi-based design, but it is also the opportunity to address a number of long-standing RFEs and issues that were to hard to address on the old v2 architecture. Byron recently reported on two of these RFEs. The first is Platform Services Support: it is now possible interact with Solaris/OpenSolaris SMF and Windows Services. Check Byron's writeup and give us feedback so we can try to incorporate it in our final September release. The second feature is on the ability to do Remote Server Restart via the CLI or an HTTP-based request (I need to check with Byron if the feature made it into the admin console).

Check these out, and please give us feedback so GlassFish v3 is as useful to you as possible.

The web admin console is often mentioned (in our "stories" for instance) as a strong feature of GlassFish but the team doesn't want to stand still and is looking at evolving the console as part of GlassFish v3 (due later this year) and is asking for feedback. The expected benefits are a more modern look and feel, bookmarkable pages, better performance, and a more extensible design to allow for customizations and more community contributions. Feature-wise, the document discusses deployment of non-war artifacts, Scripting support (monitoring of the jruby container for instance), grizzly configuration and more.

Feedback is expected before March 23rd, 2009 and should be shared on the GlassFish Forum. This has an impact on more than just GlassFish App Server so if you're a WebSpace user, a GlassFish ESB user, or an ISV building on top of GlassFish, make yourself heard!