The Sun-Oracle Strategy WebCast and subsequent Webcasts and Docs generated multiple comments and discussions threads in the Web from which I want to highlight a few comments in here. Please check the original posts for context, clarification and caveats.

On OSS licensing - "There are no plans to change the open source GlassFish licensing for any of the GlassFish modules that I am aware of as I work directly with the team right now in the integration process" (Mike Lehmann, Director of PM for WebLogic Server and GlassFish).

On clustering - "Clearly GlassFish 2.1 has clustering today and 3.0 currently does not. Customers depend on the GlassFish 2.1 implementation and as I have said on TSS we are committed to continue supporting it per our lifetime support policies" (ML).

More on clustering - "We are very much working with the team to assess how clustering will fit on the 3.x roadmap given it was already on the original 3.x roadmap - the ideal will be at least parity with 2.1 - so judge on the result when we deliver versus ahead of the plan" (ML).

Ultimately, all of these comments will need to be judged by the reality of what Oracle delivers. As I wrote at TSS, "The Proof of the Pudding is in the RoadMap". In that same thread, Mike writes: "You will have to judge us on how we execute over the next few months while we realign roadmaps and delivery schedules but I hope we can surprise folks with some good turns we can do as a combined company."

It is still very early in the process of integrating the GlassFish team into Oracle; remember that the two companies could not work together before CiC. Hopefully we will soon be able to give you more details.

This running entry collects key announcements related to Oracle's Acquisition of Sun; some from the Jan 27th event, some from companion webcasts, and some later announcements. The main theme of the acquisition is "We're Changing the Way you Buy, Run and Manage Business Systems".

Main Entry Points:

• Sun Acquisition
• Jan 27th Strategy Event. Includes webcast, highlights and presentations. 5 hours but worth it.
• Strategy Webcast Series.

From the Software Segment of the Strategy Webcast Series:

• Jeet & Hasan on Java Strategy. Covers JavaFX, JavaSE, Blu-Ray, GlassFish, JavaCard, Developer Sites, JCP, JavaOne Java For Business.
• Hasan Rizvi on Application Server. GlassFish, WebLogic, protecting investment in existing products, Oracle Application Grid, Grid Architecture, jRockit, Coherence, Tuxedo, OpenMQ, GlassFish WebStack and GF SpaceServer - and Liferay, Sun WebServer, Portal Server, Oracle WebCenter. Check slide 12 (and 6'12") for current level of details on WebLogic/GlassFish alignment.
• Richard Sarwal and Steve Wilson on Oracle Enterprise Manager and xVM OpsCenter. Combined story covers discovery, provisioning, updating, monitoring - including for virtualized assets. Application-to-disk management.
• OpenOffice, with Michael Bemmer. Open Source, name changes, Oracle value proposition, Web-Based version, JDeveloper support, Extensions, ODF-support, integration with other Oracle products.
• Cloud with Richard Sarwal. A pretty good presentation covering IAAS, PAAS, SAAS; Private and Public Clouds; range from Silo > Grid > Private Cloud > Hybrid including Private and Public Cloud; cloud-in-a-box. Discontinuing the Sun public cloud offering but leveraging Sun's technology, including Q-Layer team for Oracle products that provide flexible, self-service, dynamic services.
• Operating Systems by Edward Screven.

From the Systems Segment of the Strategy Webcast Series:

• Storage with Mike Shapiro, including OpenStorage and Flash products. Blade Server and x86 Rack Server are covered by Ali Alasti; Archival (tapes) by Jim Cates, and SPARC Servers by Masood Heydari.

Other Links and Project Status:

• Overview and FAQ for Developer Community - Covers SDN, Java.Net, Java.Sun.Com, BigAdmin, Kenai, JavaOne and more.
• Developer Tools FAQ
• Kenai - Public Site To Be Merged Into Java.Net; infrastructure supports NetBeans.org and will support Java.Net and other sites.
• WonderLand - Group at Oracle is Shut Down, but they go on their own. See New Blog Site.
• Darkstar - Project shutdown
• LivelyKernel - Seems to have moved to a New Site.
• Derby/JavaDB - Live and well (Still here).

Additional Information - Oracle continues to update their site; see also:

• Middleware Home

Press, Analysts, Friends, Others:

• @Redmonk - Cote and Stephen.
• NYtimes, WSJ, PCWorld, MercuryNews, CNet and many more...

• Competitors:
  Savio Rodrigues (IBM/Geronimo), Mark Little (JBoss) and Sateesh Narahari (MuleSoft),
• Friends:
  Scot McPhee, Markus Eisele, and Douglas Dooley.
• Thread at TSS, including posts by Mike Lehman, PM for WLS.

A general comment is that we need some time to put the roadmap together; remember that the Sun people could not work with Oracle folks before CiC, so, if there had been a detailed roadmap it would have come from Oracle, not a collaboration...

SunSolve is the standard Sun mechanism for distributing "patches" to Sun products, with content ranging from Free Public Releases and Security Patches to For-Free bug-fixing patches (the majority) and is in a multiplicity of formats, from ZIPs to PKG(5).

SunSolve has been adding features recently, including some navigational help that I just discovered, so sharing them... • A twitter account: @SunPatches, • New, per-product, content pages, including SailFin Patches and GlassFish Patches. • Better Introduction, Home Page and PatchFinder.

A full-list of categories is here - I'm afraid the GlassFish-related products fall under several places; to help you, we summarize them at GlassFishForBusiness and we report them via Twitter at @GlassFish.

I do not yet know what is the transition story for SunSolve to Oracle, but we will let you know as we find out.

Today was the Oracle Sun Strategy live webcast hosted by Charles Philips, John Fowler, Thomas Kurian, Edward Screven and others that ended with a Q&A with Larry Ellison. The recording is not yet available but Oracle released a number of other useful webcasts and docs today.

The Oracle + Sun Product Strategy Webcast Series has short (15-20') webcasts with more detailed information on most topics - e.g. App Server, Dev Tools, Manager/OpsCenter, Java, Cloud, Virtualization, OS, OpenOffice, etc. The FAQ on Community Continuity that includes Java.Net, Java.Sun.Com, JavaOne, and more. There is also a series of events around the world in a Welcome Sun Event Series.

JAG is Looking Forward and put together a visual of Duke snorkeling (or rather snorceling?) with Sparky. Hopefully this Wednesday's Webcast will clear out more details beyond those from the October 27th's Overview (although the Change-in-Control is not likely until later, so it will be interesting to see how we can/cannot answer questions from the webcast).

As advertised (and discussed) on the USERS mailing list earlier this month, Jersey 1.1.5 (an update to the JAX-RS 1.1 implementation) has now been released. This new release works on Goggle App Engine, includes Hudson-inspired tracing and will align with the also now released Atmosphere 0.5 release. Many samples are also included, some of which come from Bill Burke's (JBoss RESTeasy lead) book. You can get to Jersey 1.1.5 by reading the instructions on Paul's blog, or simply by waiting for GlassFish v3's update center to host it (wait for the notifier to ping you or check the content of the repository).

We have released an updated version of the JavaEE 5 SDK. Update 8 includes Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1 and Java SE 6 Update 18 (download, release notes and instructions). Note this is the GlassFish v2 / JavaEE 5-based release; we keep it going in parallel with the new GlassFish v3 / JavaEE 6-based release as it includes features like clustering and HA support (see Comparing v2 and v3).

Expanded from @glassfish.

While GlassFish v3 offers a lot of new features (Java EE 6 and OSGi-based modularity being the most obvious ones), we take compatibility very seriously and want your existing applications currently running in GlassFish v2.1.x or GlassFish v3-Prelude to run unmodified in our latest release. To that effect GlassFish can detect earlier versions of 'domain.xml' (the all-in-one config file for GlassFish) and upgrade it for you (when you start GlassFish v3 as one option). Please read Bobby's recent post for more on this.

The official documentation can be found in the upgrade guide. That document also covers the 'asupgrade' graphical tool (which ships with the appserver but which wasn't there in Prelude). If you want more technical details on the changes and why they were required, please read this piece. Remember that it was not supported to edit domain.xml by hand back then. It's still not supported today, but who would want to do that when you have 'asadmin', the web console, and now the RESTful API?

As a reminder, when we released GlassFish v3 on December 10th 2009 (together with Java EE 6), we had a blog storm with many many interesting posts about everything-GlassFish v3 which are summarized in previous entries: Part I and Part II.

Expanded from @glassfish.

RIP

One of the authority certificates in the Glassfish truststore expired on Jan 7, 2010. This is generating a (verbose and somewhat scary) error message on startup. You can just ignore the message, wait - the expired root was removed in update 18 of Java SE 6 and will be removed in later patches of GlassFish Server - or...

..you can eliminate the error message now by removing the expired certificate from the keystore. Kalpana has a concise recipe on how to do this while Ron goes into more details. Original thread is here; the bug report is 6852796.

Expanded from @glassfish.

Sang Shin, the tireless creator of javapassion.com teamed up with Antonio Goncalves (author of the first Java EE 6 book) and others to provide you with a free, week-long Java EE 6 Online Codecamp.

The idea is simple - tour the Java EE 6 features via slides, code sample, and detailed lab instructions at your own pace. The lab starts tomorrow (Tuesday 12th, January 2010) and lasts for a week. Check out this FAQ entry for details on what it's like to take an online course like this one. Registration is as simple as joining the javaee6-codecamp Google group. You'll also notice on the codecamp homepage that there's a great panel of advisors (spec lead, tech leads, ...) ready to answer technical questions you may have.

This code camp is a nice follow-up to the "Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3" Virtual Conference, and obviously leverages both GlassFish v3 and NetBeans 6.8 which have now been final for a month.

Content for the first two topics have already been posted : "Java EE 6 Overview & Getting Java EE 6 sample codes" as well as "Servlet 3.0". Others labs include CDI (Context and Dependency Injection), JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1, JSF 2.0, Java EE 6 End to End, GlassFish v3 OSGi, and Embeddable GlassFish v3.

Mike Somekh, Mark Foster, Rastislav Kanocz have published an in-depth 42 page whitepaper on High Availability with GlassFish ESB. This whitepaper goes beyond just describing how to implement an ESB in a development environment: it covers how to move the ESB into mission-critical, high volume production and provides insight from experts who have successfully delivered real-world, high performance middleware infrastructures. The paper covers the options for delivering mission-critical GlassFish ESB solutions into Production as well as the critical requirements and considerations to be taken into account when designing and deploying highly-available applications. It also describes a reference architecture based on a typical real-world scenario which the authors have implemented. Download the whitepaper

We released GlassFish v2.1.1 at the end of October and last week we released our first commercial patch for it. Due to how the multiple releases intersect, this patch is also GFv2.1 p7 and SJS AS 9.1U2 p13. GFv2.1.1 p1 addresses 31 new defects since GFv2.1.1.

The patches are delivered in several formats (file and pkg) and became available at SunSolve in December 18th. More details on the release, including the list of bugs addressed, are available at GlassFish For Business, and at SunSolve.

I've also updated the GlassFish v2 Family Overview and created a new entry for a GlassFish v3 Family Overview.

The recordings of the JavaEE 6 and GlassFish v3 Virtual Conference are now available. Slides are also available. Registration is required in both cases; enjoy! The VC was a great success; more info on it after the Holiday break. Credits - The picture shown at the left is that of Jack Mullin who recorded the Bing Crosby's Show on the influential Ampex 200.

Our JavaEE 6 / GlassFish v3 Virtual Conference was a great success - and a lot of fun. I'm going to let Harpreet report on the detailed attendance numbers, but peak simultaneous (not total/aggregated) attendance at the keynotes was over 1400. This is our first time, so I don't have comparison numbers, but it seems very good for an online presentation in mid-December!

The general feedback from attendees, presenters and chat participants was very positive and many people suggested us to do these more often. A couple of reports are here and here.

The most common questions have been: Will the recordings be available? (yes) How soon (hopefully within a couple of weeks) and How do I get them? (will notify people in the GlassFish registration mailing list, and will post at GlassFish Resources)