Go to the front page of Sun.com and Follow the link for an invitation to this Event on Tuesday. You're Invited to See the World's First OLTP Database Machine With FlashFire Technology Hosted by Larry Ellison; John Fowler will also attend.

The boards of directors for both companies Approved the Sun-Oracle Deal, Sun's Shareholders Approved it and the US DoJ Approved it, but the European Union is still investigating. The EU Commission is the executive branch of the EU and its cabinet has 27 Commissioners. Of these, Neelie Kroes (@Wikipedia, @CNet) is the Commissioner for Competition and her office just announced an In-Depth Investigation (also see NYTimes). As they say, story evolving...

Related news are tagged Sun+Oracle. I also post links to related industry news at TheAquarium@Twitter.

Added I've not done any systematic tracking of how the press is reacting to this announcement, but the sources I follow are negative on the motivations spelled out in the EU ruling; see below for a few links:

• NYTimes: New Snag for Oracle in Sun Deal
• InternetNews: EU May Delay Oracle-Sun Nuptials
• InformationWeek: Global CIO: Oracle Nailed By EU Protectionism As HP And IBM Raid Sun .
• CNet News: The EU's Christmas gift to Oracle
• ComputerWorld (check the comments): Why the EU should block Oracle/Sun

It took a bit longer than anticipated, but we have updated the repositories behind GlassFish v3 Preview (STABLE from glassfish.sun.com). You are most likely to notice this through the see new SoftwareUpdate tool, but you might also see it through the GUI UpdateTool or the embedded UpdateTool, or do it manually via the CLI. Full details in Alexis writeup and Abhijit's announcement. The whole thing has been working very well for me in recent builds but this is software, so please let us know if you experience any issues.

A couple of weeks we provided an update of the GlassFish v2.1.1 Schedule; it's now time to do the same with that for GlassFish v3.

The key driver for GlassFish v3 is JavaEE 6. This means GFv3 leverages the expertise of the wide JCP community and our users have the benefits of a standard but... it also means we don't control all the variables - which is ultimately good, but can be painful in the short-term.

We knew things could get complicated when JSR 330 appeared in mid-May, after the PFD for most of JavaEE 6, and was later accepted by the JCP EC. The relationship between JSR 330 and JSR 299 was resolved recently and both will be part of JavaEE 6, so it was just a matter of doing the numbers, and... The answer is about 8 weeks. The updated GF v3 Roadmap puts the FCS at Nov 24th, just in time for Thanksgiving@USA. The change propagates to NetBeans 6.8 (roadmap) as well as follow-up releases to GFv3 (exact dates still shimmering).

So, that's the new date. It's actually quite good, considering the magnitude of the last-minute change. Overall, I know 330 will make for a better release - just let's hope that next time submissions don't come so late in the cycle... See GlassFish+v3

Further consolidation in the industry: VMware is acquiring SpringSource; see S2's Announcement (website is down; can't take the load?) and TSS Post. The Press Conference is in an hour or so (3:30pm PT); maybe more details then.

Added

• The CTOs/CEOs speak: Rod (website down, can't take the load?) and Steve Harrod (VMware CTO).
• The usual pundits in the press: Darry Taft @eWeek, Paul Krill@Infoworld, Gavin Clarke @ ElReg.
   (I'll confess I'm puzzled - how can these guys not mention the impact on Oracle/Sun in these pieces?... sigh!)

Added - The "morning after" analysis is significantly better and worth commenting:

• Cote@RedMonk - A good analysis emphasizing the public / private cloud possibilities, and the possible Java leadership angles. Let's see what Oracle does with its new assets when they get them...
• Jay Lyman@451Group - A reasonable piece pointing out the industry moves.
• Matt Assay@TheOpenRoad - Points out the increased pressure on RedHat - I agree, I think they will get acquired "soon" - and argues that S2's valuation would be much higher in a short time - I disagree, I think this is as good as they can get, although Hyperic was a very good move on their part.

Kohsuke and I have been hinting at this for a while (and we pre-announced it at JavaOne) and now it is official: reflecting the continued growth of Hudson Adoption, Sun now provides Commercial Support for Hudson. Formally speaking, the offer is part of the Recently Announced WebStack 1.5 and you buy it via the GlassFish Portfolio Offering. In a nutshell, we are providing sustaining support, with priority treatment for bug fixes filed by customers. We also can provide consultative support for people interested in, say, creating private plugins or improving their internal Agile processes. Kohsuke has collected all the key pointers into this Summary Page.

Additional links include the Features in the Offer, Terms of Support (bottom of main page) and Service-Level Agreement (bottom of main page). As always, we appreciate your feedback to help us continue to improve Hudson and Sun's offerings.

Added - Reports from the web:

• Our team in Hungary

Java EE 6 will include JSR 330 and JSR 299. Roberto explains the changes: • JSR-299 will be updated to use the JSR-330 annotations • JSR-330 has evolved to take into account requirements from JSR-299 • Both JSRs will be part of the Java EE 6 Platform

Thanks to everybody that worked so hard to make these changes; obviously we wished this had happened earlier in the Java EE 6 cycle but the result will be an improved platform. We estimate that the final release of Java EE 6 (and GFv3) will be around November but we should have specific dates next week.

Check out Roberto's Announcement for details.

Sun's LAMP support is assembled from two pieces: the L is from our Linux/GNU Support (see SunSolve entry), while the AMP comes from the GlassFish WebStack, which, in its latest incarnation includes Apache HTTP Server, lighttpd, memcached, MySQL, PHP, Python, Ruby, Squid, Tomcat, GlassFish (v2.1) and Hudson (features).

The inclusion of Hudson is a bit of an opportunistic move (more on that in a bit), the rest comprises a well tested, integrated, optimized, and extended component stack for your new and old Web Apps.

The WebStack can be downloaded here; the bundle includes the WebStack Enterprise Manager, which, unlike the other components, is not free right-to-use but rather is available with an eval license; this is a model like that of the GlassFish Enterprise Manager. The current release supports RHEL, Solaris and OpenSolaris (it is bundled in OpenSolaris); for additional details, check out the Documentation and Discussion Forum.

Check out these posts from the WebStack team:

If you missed Kaj's announcement in the splashing news commotion at the latest MySQL Conference, then you may be interested to get this information again. There was a piece of news that should be extremely important for all the users. MySQL server binaries used to be split between Enterprise and Community, and they were released with separate schedules. Not anymore. Starting from April 2009, the MySQL Community and Enterprise editions are built from the same code, and they are released with the same frequency.

There were rumors about the two editions being treated differently. Since we are talking about it, let me assure you that this is not the case. Both editions go through the same tests, and even more so now, since they come from the same tree. Until version 5.0.81, there was a separate tree for Community (with extra features), but now there is only one.

For every bug fix release, both editions are released on the same day.

Another difference that has disappeared is the version number. Previously, even numbers were for Enterprise, odd ones for Community. Now, every version number identifies both the Community and Enterprise edition.

Enjoy the best bits from MySQL. download at will!

I've posted the May 09 GlassFish Adoption Report. Some growth from April 09, but not back to the March 09 peak; probably some seasonal drop, possibly some impact from the Oracle announcement. The full report includes the usual download data for run-time and tools bundles, a comparison with JBoss downloads, GeoMap, Registration and Update Center.

I expect to post the June report next week.

Alexis has a nice summary of the different GlassFish releases, explaining how to Choose the Right Release: GlassFish v2.1, GlassFish v3 Prelude or GlassFish v3 Preview. In a nutshell, v2.1 is for production deployments, v3 Preview is a beta for v3 final and v3 Prelude is/was a transitional release... ... but you want the full story, so check Alexis' Answers... ... or just ask Ask the Magic 8 Ball :-)

Alexis has posted additional entries in his GlassFish à la carte series. Part I and Part II (also see Review) showed how to get a minimal distro and add components to it, including some containers; Part III shows how to create a Custom Layered Distro from GlassFish v3 using the IPS tools.

The distro only bundles pre-existing components; enough to run an ejb/jersey sample. I think that this layered distro arrangement may become quite common for distribution of packages for GFv3 and it nicely shows the power of the modularity in GFv3, IPS and the embedded IPS support in GFv3.

Alexis' examples show how to create the new package, add it to your own IPS repository, and then create a new domain to run the EJB-Jersey sample. The IPS setup is very easy thanks to the documents and binaries from IPS Best Practices project, plus the Package Prototype from Alexis. To learn about IPS, check out Producing and Maintaining Packages (specially Christophe's Prezo) and MakePkgs. All the binaries you need are included in the IPS Toolkit.

The whole thing works like a champ; excerpting some of the key commands from my shell trascript:

# Created a directory for my local repo % pkg/bin/pkg.depotd -p 10001 -d /Users/pelegri/Software/my-repo # port no. and store dir. # downloaded package prototype and renamed it as pkg_proto_epll.py % cat >LICENSE.txt # need a LICENSE file! % pkg/bin/makepkgs -s http://localhost:10001/ -b ../Sample ../Sample/pkg_proto_epll.py % bin/pkg set-publisher -P --enable -O http://pkg.glassfish.org/v3/dev dev.glassfish.org % bin/pkg set-publisher --enable -O http://localhost:10001 localRepo % bin/updatetool # screenshot % bin/pkg install sample-distro # pretty much all done % bin/asadmin create-domain --instanceport 8080 --adminport 4848 mydomain % bin/asadmin start-domain mydomain # download the jersey-ejb sample WAR file % bin/asadmin deploy ../../jersey-samples/jersey-ejb-1.1.1-ea-SNAPSHOT.war % open http://localhost:8080/jersey-ejb/ # screenshot

Now that JSF 2.0 is Final and is is easily accessible in GFv3 Preview, it is a good time to learn more about it, so here is a set of useful links:

Also, all related TA entries are tagged JSF... And, please send us feedback on the spec or the implementation to help us with the Fit and Finish.

After a few months of development, bug fixing, testing, etc, GlassFish ESB v2.1 is now released. New in this release is that is a lot easier to scale GlassFish ESB through clustering. All components now have support for clustering. By the way, GlassFish ESB clustering is (of course) based on GlassFish clustering. Also new in this release is the inclusion of the IEP SE and Scheduler BC (a new component!), several component enhancements, and support for AIX 5.3. More details can be found in the release notes. And GlassFish ESB v2.1 can be downloaded from the OpenESB downloads page!

You probably know that the new, modular, GlassFish v3 is built from (OSGi) components that can be updated using IPS. We assemble these pieces into ready-to-go JavaEE 6 Web Profile and full JavaEE 6 bundles but they can also be used to create à la carte distributions, as Alexis shows in his latest posts.

I recommend you to at least try the first example to get a better understanding of how all these technologies work together. The beauty of GFv3 is that everything is very small and fast - I'm writing this entry from a public WiFi site with pretty moderate connectivity and I'm spending more time waiting on BSC than running the example.

Part I starts with a IPS toolkit image from IPS Best Practices. The toolkit image is 5MB (most of it is the python 2.4 runtime) and has no GlassFish in it. From there, the next step is to download the GF v3 nucleus (2.41MB), which automatically brings in Felix (564KB), Grizzly (943KB) and HK2 (565KB); the IPS packages include the relevant OSGi modules. The rest of that entry shows how to install the updatecenter IPS pkg (that is the biggest package because of python graphical toolkit) and how to use it to add the management pkg, and then creates and starts a domain.

Part II in the series shows first how to install the GFv3 Web Container; then it mirrors Jerome's recent entry on GF v3, OSGi and Spring (that portion gets a bit complex and I see that Jerome already published a simpler version). Part III will continue the main theme of creating an a la carte GF v3 that has the components you want and is yet extensible.