Kaj Arnö, MySQL ambassador to Sun, has written a digest of his blogging production this year. It's an intriguing reading, because Kaj has been more on the road than at home this year, mostly performing the duties of communicator, explaining to Sun people what really is this MySQL that had just been acquired, and sharing his findings with fellow (ex) MySQL employees. Kaj's blogging sometimes has the role of breaking the news to the community. For example, he was the one who first wrote about the Sun acquisition of MySQL (published his post at 8:02 EST, barely one minute after Marten's jaw dropping announcement from the podium.)

I just tried IceRocket again after using only Bloglines for a while and that reminded me why I liked it so much. A quick search on GlassFish took me around the world: Sao Paulo, Chile, Pune, France, Loja (Ecuador), Puebla.

I think I'm going to use both Bloglines and IceRocket for a bit, see how they compare and will report back.

Dave Johnson had already reported previously that Roller was available from the GlassFish Update Center. This time there seems to be even more to it than just a blogging engine - see Dave's latest entry for some details about "Social Software for GlassFish". Curious? Download GlassFish v2 ur1 and run the Update Center client (INSTALL/updatecenter/bin/updatetool). You can also read the Documentation.

Congratulations to Dave Johnson and the rest of the Apache Roller team for releasing this major version.of the blogging engine used by 4292 Sun Public bloggers (86691 entries and 87365 comments). BSC (blogs.sun.com) has been running Roller 4.0-dev since July and as heavy users we give it the thumbs up (as we do to the team running the infrastructure).

Roller now lets you handle themes much easier (get some here), supports plugins, has a much improved install process (including using the GlassFish Update Center), and implementation-wise uses Java 5, Struts 2 and JPA.

Who said Social Software was seldom written in Java?

Avinash has kind words to say about the significance of jRuby and GlassFish. I always enjoy the global angle of blogging and it is special to see this post from Mauritius; some of you may be familiar with the island from Following the Equator, by Mark Twain (Project Guttenberg, Wikipedia): "You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius" Following the Equator was a Travelogue; i.e. and old-technology blog :-).

According to the Wikipedia, Mauritius seems a very interesting island. In addition to its beauty it is installing a coast-to-coast WiFi system, has the 2nd highest GDP per capita in Africa and it is gearing towards becomming a duty--free island.

Nazrul has announced the winner of the GlassFish TV contest - Jason Lee (blog). Jason works for Objectstream in Oklahoma City and happens to be a contributor to the JavaServer Faces RI. He will soon receive his 52-inch (!) LCD HD TV. You can read his winning blog entries : • Virtual Hosting Using Apache and GlassFish • Comparing the GlassFish and OC4J Admin Consoles The decision was really hard to make as there was a lot of very good entries. Thanks to everyone for participating!

Simon has announced the release of Pebble 2.0. The announcement explicitly mentions Tomcat 5.5 and GlassFish as the supported platforms. Pebble is a lightweight blogging software that does not require a database for operation. Download it from here.

More reports of packages running on GlassFish. We previously reported about Blojsom and Roller; now Gregory reports success converting from Blojsom to Pebble and from Tomcat to GlassFish. Pebble looks good; it is based on Java EE technologies and it is intended to be lightweight and easy to administer. The installation worked but Gregory had to find his way around a couple of problems so check his blog to save yourself some time.

We earlier reported on Roller. Another popular Blogging Sofware is Blojsom; for example it is used in Mac OS X Tiger Server Weblog Server. Siraj just wrote that Blojsom runs on GlassFish; more details in his blog.