An update on this year's SOA World Magazine Reader's Choice Vote. As of this writing, the projects from GlassFish and Friends are doing very well, below are the top three vote getters within each applicable category:

All the categories where we entered an entry we have an entry with the top vote getter. And the only place where we have an entry that is not the top is in Security where both Metro and OpenSSO entered (possibly people not noticing it?).

So, go ahead and... Vote!

Several people have asked about the status of the GAP program, so here is a very quick update.

According to the rules, the submission period closed end of June; the list of submissions is at GapSubmissions, with 260 bug submissions and 52 contribution submissions. The next step was for the program judges, which were Gregg Sporar, Simon Phipps, Paul Sterk, Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine and myself. The summer slowed down a bit the evaluation process but for the last 4 weeks the jury, with help from the leads of the different projects, validated the bug submissions and judged the contributions. We also applied some of the contest rules, like no more than 5 winners for Bugs and 1 per contribution.

There were many, very good, submissions and the judges reflected that quality by spreading the awards. We have reported the results to the outside company that is helping with the final steps, so we cannot give you the final report yet, but we can give you some ballpark information. We have around 102 winners with very wide geographic distribution. We expect all the contribution prizes to be awarded, and we expect around 16 honorable mentions.

More details as soon as we get final confirmations!

The GlassFish Quality group is expanding its community outreach and just started a new Community Acceptance Testing Program for the GlassFish Server (FishCAT). The program is inspired by NetBean's NetCAT program. Please consider participating. Details are at the FishCAT Home Page and in the FishCAT FAQ. Also check out Judy's Announcements for details on how to apply to be in the team - the deadline is August 15th. All this is getting ready for the GlassFish v3 release; more details imminent.

The MySQL community is united for a noble purpose. Leaving aside their usual differences about release cycles and openness philosophy, the community is united in helping the son of Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL Support engineer, to overcome the difficult challenge of financing a life saver bone marrow transplant. The MySQL project has made its e-commerce site available to help raising the funds as quickly as possible. A very young life is in danger, and many people from inside and outside the company have donated for Ivan.

This is not the first case of open source and life saving tied together. For example, Matthew Swift, one of the lead developers of the OpenDS project, has combined a sport challenge with help for research on Leukodystrophy. Check out his Tri4Joe blog.

The MySQL Community is taking charge of counting its own ranks, by means of a survey with the purpose of measuring the usage of the world most popular open source database. The proposal comes from Keith Murphy, editor of the MySQL Magazine, which should host the results in July.

More attention to this survey is coming from Lenz Grimmer MySQL Community Manager for EMEA, and Mark Schoonover, who is co-author of the survey. I also chimed in.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 1st 2008, 9am PST, 6pm CET, 5pm GMT is the monthly OpenDS meeting and Gilles Bellaton will present on OpenDS replication. Check the details in Ludo's Post Also check Ludo's Call For Votes on OpenDS Issues.

PS - Tomorrow is April Fool's Day. Sun used to have Very Elaborate jokes (I remember the All The Wood Behind One Arrow). The fun seems to be back at Sun, let's see what happens tomorrow...

One of the nice, and funny things about working on the MySQL deal is that we took turns saying: "I like how you solved this problem, tell me more!" The deal closed; learning time starts... Jay Pipes is Mr MySQL Forge and he just released Forge 2, check out his announcement and Guiseppe's additional commentary ([1], [2]). Maybe we can invite Jay (et al.) for a presentation at a future GlassFish meeting?

BTW, I see that Jay's experience with MediaWiki was similar to that of one of our teams: very hard to mold it for new tasks.

GlassFish is swimming East to India and Australia in the next couple of weeks: - GlassFish Day in Hyderabad, India, Feb 29th 2008 - GlassFish Day in Sydney, Australia, March 6th 2008

After the mandatory stop in the Bay Area for CommunityOne, JavaOne and GlassFish-specific activities, GlassFish is heading for Switzerland for the Jazoon conference (see Christian's blog about this).

The agenda isn't yet finalized, but Jerome Dochez (GlassFish Architect) will be one of several speakers and will cover GlassFish v3 (interesting progress should be made in the coming months). This page will track the agenda as we go. Note this is a FREE event for all (the Jazoon web page isn't clear about this).

• Sun and MySQL Welcome Aboard!, Reactions, More Reactions • Access Control - ANYONE Access, Policy Project, Usng OpenSSO • Web Services - Maven Plug-in, Jersey 0.5, Tango in Chinese • Oracle & BEA - Oracle and BEA • Admin and Mangerment - VisualVM • Communiy - Paul Sterk, GF @ Hyderabad • Adoption - Heard on the Web • Misc - Migrate!, SailFin and NB 6.1

Breaking News! MySQL will be part of the Sun family! MySQL (the M in LAMP) is extremely popular in new "Web 2.0" applications. For example MySQL is #4 at Ohloh.net behind Firefox, Subversion and Apache, and ahead of PHP. Adoption is strong even in the enterprise: 6 out of our 13 Adoption Stories use MySQL.

We are all extremely excited about the possibilities; both for developers and for deployers. We will keep you posted of developments as they happen. Fun times ahead!

Paul has a new role: Community Manager for the GlassFish Community. The role initially was held by Jim, Amy and Carla, then by Shreedhar and then by Jamey in an interim basis but for quite a while we have been making-do with a number of us pooling our "spare" time. Paul will be working on this pretty much full-time, which is sorely needed. Check out Paul's introduction, and you might as well check out his latest update on the Conversion of GFv3 to Hg.

Now that most people are back from the holiday's break, we need to close on the GlassFish Grants and Awards Program. If you are interested please check the Original TA post, the two posts at Users@GF ([1], [2]), the threads at the Advocacy@GF alias and the Program Page at our Wiki.

The intention is to design as simple a program as possible, possibly borrowing the programs that other communities are using. We will be using the advocacy mailing list for any further announcements.

Sun has announced a Community Awards Program. This is going to be a multi-year program and this year it covers six communities: OpenOffice.org, OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, NetBeans and GlassFish. Each community will define its own program, in particular they can combine awards with grants. The overall guidelines will be described by Simon at his FOSS.IN keynote and we will start working on the GlassFish part of the program in the next few days.

• Community: Closing on Tomcat?, New SCA, Hudson Podcast, GF@FOSS.IN • Real-Life Stories: GF at the Airport • GF Know-How: SSL, Provisioning, Seam and Maven • Experimental: Alternate Mac JVM • Comet: with IceFaces, with DWR • SailFin: ATT's ECharts • OpenESB on JavaSE and JBoss; New OpenDS Build

After so many years working with lawyers whose job was to make sure we didn't say the wrong thing, I smile every time I see a post by Mike :-). Anyhow, directly from the lawyer's keyboard, the latest Sun Contribution Agreement (v1.5) is out. The new SCA is still under 1 page. And there are no changes in the legal implications, it is just... more readable! Amazing! Check it out here. The plan is to switch to the new SCA in all our communities, but, if you signed the old one, no need to sign the new one and resubmit.